Daily Craft - Edible finger painting

Since it's been so hot recently, I've been hesitant to take the wee one to the park for fear of burning his butt on the plastic bucket swings.  This means I've been searching for indoor activities and finger painting seemed like a great idea.  Owen still puts everything in his mouth so I needed edible paint and, with this paint recipe from Growing A Jeweled Rose (who is a wealth of handy info for baby and toddler activities in general), I figured I'd give it a shot and make some potato paint.  When I first shared my plan with Husband, he laughed at me and wished me good luck, but I was determined.  I armed myself with some sketch paper and potato flakes from the dollar store, stripped off the baby, laid a towel on his high chair to try and contain the mess, and made paints in red, yellow, green, and blue.

He wasn't quite sure what to make of it at first and needed some gentle encouragement, but was happy smearing the potato flakes around for a little bit.  He definitely tried to eat some, which I was anticipating.  Although I'm not quite sure he got the concept, he seemed to be curious nonetheless.  It pained me a little bit to admit that I probably spent more time cleaning up than actually painting, but I think we still had fun and I have a pretty neat (albeit lumpy) picture to show for it.  

If you are curious about clean up, the food coloring was sufficiently sucked into the potato flakes that it didn't make a mess and wiped up nicely.  The only bit that didn't wash off immediately was the couple of drops I got on myself when making the potato paint in the first place.  Overall, a success!  What are your favorite indoor activities?  We're always open to suggestion.

Daily Art - Foto Friday

So that you can all see what I've been up to with my Project 365 photography adventure, I'm going to try and start doing "my week in photos" each Friday.  That will be a picture from every day each week...I hope you enjoy it and would love to hear which are you favorites!

Daily Art - PhotoGrunt blog feature

For those of you that may not be aware, photography is my art.  I love taking pictures, although I haven't had the time or motivation recently to really get out and about with my camera.  It's something I've been seriously meaning to work on as I'm unhappy with the fact I've not had much to add to my portfolio in a while.  I've also been meaning to work on my portfolio so I can get some more photography gigs to support my camera equipment habit!  (Shameless self-promotion for my website Organic Stills, just in case you know anybody in the Greater Los Angeles area that needs a wedding photog, baby pics, etc.)

Over the years I've sold a handful of prints on Etsy, and it always makes me smile when I think that somewhere out there people are enjoying my art on their walls.  Right now my shop is on hiatus until I can build some new material and craft more inventory in general.  I think I need a direction more than anything.  Today though, having not even looked at my Etsy store in weeks, I got a message from a fellow photographer who noted that he featured one of my shots on his blog - PhotoGrunt.  I guess he went through a bunch of photo listings on Etsy that are about to expire and wanted to feature them, for which I am very appreciative for that last piece of exposure.  Check out his piece here (my photo "Left Behind" is 4th from the bottom).  If you're interested in photography at all, this is a fun blog to check out as he features random photographers from Etsy, which also means that those shots are for sale and could end up adorning your walls!

What this has inspired me to do however, is to feature some of my photography on my blog and give you a little background of where the shots were taken.  It'll be a little insight into my world through the viewfinder.