Make a cute Halloween Votive.

Finally, Mr T (our Tibetan Wind) was allowed to play in K's sand painting. He love it, running his finger through the colors and seeing how they mixed together making a new color all together. He twirled the sand, heaped it, flattened it, until it was a rainbow mixture.

When he tired of it, I picked up the glass dish K's sand rainbow had been in to throw the sand away.

"What are you doing, Mummy?" K asked in horror.

"Why? I'm throwing it away."

"But MOMMY!! You CANT!! It's SPECIAL sand!!! It's MY sand!"

"Ok... well" I managed, clearly at a loss. What on earth was I to do with a dish of murky sand?

Then I remembered something I saw years ago... a little glass candle votive that had been covered in sand. It gave off such a gentle, warm glow. Perhaps we could get just one more sand activity from our colored sand! And with a little fun, maybe I could even turn it into a Halloween craft!!

This is what we needed to make our Halloween votive candle...

Two glass candle holders, SPECIAL SAND, sticky tape, scissors, glue, paint brush.

I cut out pumpkins from the sticky tape and stuck them onto the glass votive...

K wanted a Jack-a-lantern, so we cut a scary mouth, triangle nose and triangle eyes from the sticky tape and stuck them into place.

Then we painted the votives with glue.

Rolled them in the sand...

So that they were totally covered...

And set them in the sun to dry.

Then, when the sand had completely dried, we carefully peeled the sticky tape from the glass. It was a little hard to see where the sticky tape was and, in the future, I'll use colored tape instead of clear tape to make this easier. Wonderful clear glass pumpkins and Jack-a-lanterns glowed in the morning sun!

The kids couldn't wait for the sun to set. We lit our votive candles and watched their warm glow flicker happily.
Happy Halloween !

Be sure to come back on Friday's to participate in Friday's Nature Table, our nature collective where we share our nature-inspired posts.

Blessings and magic.

How to make a Miniature Zen Garden.

Yesterday we thought about the wisdom of ancient Tibet when we painted a lovely rainbow with our colorful sand.

Today, we talked about Buddhism as we made a miniature Zen Garden.

We learnt that a Zen Garden is a place of meditation and we experienced how calming it is to work with sand... to rake it, let it run through our fingers, watch it change shape as we move it with our hands.

This is what we needed to make our Miniature Zen Garden...

A glass, wooden our metal container

A spoon

Sand (we used some of the beach sand that we colored the other day)

And Zen treasures, we decided upon pretty rocks and earth-colored marbles.

We put the sand in the dish. The green and purple sand mixed together to make a lovely pink. We used the spoon to make the sand level.

We took our little rake and made a spiral marking in the sand. We positioned our Zen treasures in our Miniature Zen Garden, making use of the spiral markings to maximize our gardens aesthetic appeal. We placed and removed our treasures many times until we thought it looked just right.
Mr T was very impressed!
And then we played in it... for a very long time... raking, placing treasures... covering treasures, making markings in the sand... arranging treasures again. We 'meditated a lot!'
Can you believe that we made the Zen Garden Tools too? You won't believe how easy they are! Have a look at the link above to see how we made them.

Blessings and magic.

Painting With Colored Sand.

One of my very favorite movies is Kundun. Watching it is a magical experience from beginning to end. I vividly remember the very first time I saw it... it opens with the Tibetan Monks painting with sand. They work for hours making the most beautiful image from colored sand. It's huge, covering the entire floor... spirals, waves, twirls, blues, greens, yellows. It is a magnificent sight... and then, when it is finally finished, they open the huge wooden doors of the temple and let the wind sweep over the colorful floor, blowing their magnificent labors away. At first it is a terrible shock that all their work was for nothing, swept away, gone! But then you get a glimmer of the wisdom that is Tibet... that it is not the creation that is important but the creating. It is profound! Such a valuable lesson for all of us.

Last week we made wonderful colored sand. It was a fun, colorful activity... click on the link above if you missed how it is made.

Today we painted with our colored sand. We used the sand we colored last week, a glass dish a spoon, a funnel and a straw

.

We made our own sand dispenser by inserting our straw into the funnel. It was a little long for K to manage comfortably so we cut it to the right length.

We poured our yellow sand into the glass dish and K spread it evenly.
With a little shake of the glass dish from me, the sand was even and ready to be painted on.
K decided she wanted to create a rainbow. She drew a faint outline in the sand to guide her.
We filled up the funnel with purple sand, keeping a finger on the bottom of the straw to keep the sand in it.
Then K positioned the funnel over where she wanted the purple sand to go, removed her finger from the bottom of the straw and let the sand fall from it in the shape of her rainbow.
It was very exciting to finally let the sand drop from the funnel and we giggled with abandon.
Then the blue rainbow arc.
The pink.
Finally, the green.Isn't it pretty?

Of course, our rainbow needed some embellishment so K used a little stick to run the colors into each other.

Isn't it even more beautiful?!
But, alas, when I suggested we let Little Brother play in it (a simulation of the Tibetan winds) a loud cry of protest could be heard for miles around! Needless to say, it is sitting on our table now for all to admire.

Blessings and magic.

How to make Colored Sand.

Mr T insisted on bringing home a bucket of sand from the beach. Unlike me, he loves sand so much and can play with it for hours. He really doesn't mind if it gets in his hair, his clothes, his bed!

So, to enthuse with this love, we decided to make colored sand.

This is what we needed;

a bucket of sand

a sieve

6 large Ziploc bags

6 colors of foodcoloring

spoons

paper towels

water

We made little bowls from the Ziplock bags like this...

We set our sieve in the Ziploc bowl and filled it with sand.

As the sand was from the beach, it was full of small shells that we wanted to separate from the sand. T loves to sift stuff. He took this job very seriously and meticulously sifted all the shells from the clean sand.

We arranged the sand-filled bags on the grass as the next step is to add the food coloring. We wanted to make sure that a mistake did not mean a permanently colored patio!

Granny helped Mr T wet the sand with water from a jug.
We added enough water to make the sand soggy. Too much water will make it hard for the sand to absorb the food coloring.

K joined us for the fun task of adding color to our soggy sand. We added food coloring liberally.

Then we zipped up the bags and massaged the color into the sand. K loved the tactile nature of massaging the sand through the bag. It was cool and squishy and made a wonderful scrunching noise if you listened carefully.

We added different colors to our bags of sand and then laid them flat for 30 minutes to let the sand absorb the color.

Then we turned each bag out onto a couple of sheets of strong paper towels to dry in the sand.

It dried in a day. Tomorrow we are going to use our colored sand to make something fun... stay tuned!
Blessings and magic.