this woman’s work

Meira asked if I took a picture of the frame we made for Jessica. Sadly, no but I’ll tell you how I did it. (In the next post after this one I’ll upload the pic of Madison we used and password protect it.)

I can’t find a picture of the frame we used (I got it at Target) but it had a 4 x 4 opening in the center and the small frame around that said “Live Laugh Love” (and you know, it’s darling but these frames with writing will look totally dated in a few years) and then beyond that it had a very large area that was all glass. I think the whole thing was maybe 8 x 8. Anyhow, I cut Madison’s painting to fit the glass part so it looked like a mat.

Any frame with a big white mat would work just swell for this kind of thing. We used to make Brett’s father’s day presents from a similar idea. Noah would color the mat and then we’d frame a picture of Brett being a dad. We did this for seven years and then last year we broke with tradition. I have no idea what we did last year but we were running out of wall space. We got the frames from World Market/Cost Plus. They are these cheap (like five or six bucks) 8 x 10 frames cut for a 4 x 6 picture. The frame itself is a thin plastic holder and you snap the glass in over the mat and picture. They’re cheap enough that you could set up an assembly line and make a few for the grandparents, too.

Now here’s an old preschool teacher’s trick for getting a really good finger painting from a toddler. Have them paint right on the table or on their high chair tray. Just squirt one color on one side of the paint area and squirt another color on the other side and let ‘em mix it up. Then take the mat (or the paper) and drop it down on top of the painting after your kid has really gooshed things up but before they’ve gooshed things so far that you’ve lost all the colors. You might need to softly pat the back of the mat/paper to make sure it picks up enough paint. When you drop the mat (or paper) onto the paint you’ll end up with a beautifully swirled and textured picture and you don’t have to worry about the paper getting all screwed up the way you might if you just let your kid paint directly on it. (You know, that all the nice colors end up brown or they rub a hole in the paper.)

The other thing about toddler finger painting for display purposes is that more than two colors is probably too much. Use two colors that make a color (red/yellow, blue/green — like that) or use a color with some white. (You can also use one color with some black but you have to go really easy on the black.) Besides making for nicer pictures it’s also (I believe) more fun for a toddler because they can really see how these colors mesh and change and if you give them too many then it’s overwhelming.

If you want to do what we did, snap a series of pictures while your kid goes to town on the paint on the table/in their high chair tray. Then even if you make three or more mats out of the session every picture will represent the result. If you look at the picture of Madison that will be in the next entry you’ll see she’s not painting on paper.

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