I was reading Sew Liberated’s Toddler Arts Experience and learned about the book First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos.  There are some simple activities from “Primarily Paint” and “Making Marks” sections that required very little materials. I decided to try water painting and drawing in sand.

First, I gave them empty peanut butter jars, brushes and water for the water paint. They started painting on the pavement. Then, Luis brought out all his “vehicles” and used the brush and water to clean them. Eiya helped him out too.

Then, I put some sand in the foil dish for them. They first drew with fingers, grabbing and pouring sand in and out. However, when I brought out more water for refilling. They started adding water to the sand and making sand pie. Eiya started kneading the sand dough with her hands and feet. Moving sand dough from dish to watering can back and forth. More kneading and moving.

After all the fun, we baked the pie under the sun.

For our sixth wedding anniversary, Ethan got me this very cool vintage doctor’s travel case from etsy for my seed collection. It  is so neat! The leather case opens up into two sides with 20 slots for glass vials. Three original vials are missing and hopefully, I will come across them in my future thrifting ventures.

Earlier on, I photographed my seed collection this year and have been keeping them in tiny glass bottles. This case comes in so handy. It transforms my seed collection into a beautiful mini portable seed library. Today, I finally have some time to type out little title strips and inserted them in each vial as label to identify the seeds.

Thank you mimo! This is so lovely.

When I visited my friend Lissa’s garden couple of weeks ago, she gave me some Mexican Sunflower seeds from her garden. She knows that I have been hunting and gathering for seeds. Then she asked me “How do you keep track of your seeds? Do you photograph them?”

Actually, I have just been collecting seeds and putting them in different small bottles so far. I have been able to identify them without too much trouble. Photographing them seem to be a great and useful way to make sure that I don’t someday get them mixed up. (It is fun to take my Remington Typewriter out to do some typing too.) And hopefully, my little digital library of seeds would be useful to someone else as well.

Thank you Lissa for giving me this great idea to keep track of my seeds. I am looking forward to sowing them next year in my garden.

Click here to view the complete seed collection

Image locations on Google Maps: http://tinyurl.com/2dthgt

Images of video projection in different phases of interaction. Please click on each image for larger view.

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