Messy Crafts: Bottle Things!

For our messy craft program today, I had originally planned to make water bottle mobiles. This idea, which I got somewhere (I am awful about picking up ideas and not remembering where they came from) was sort of a variation on the making-shakers-out-of-water-bottles, only you put paint and things in them and then hung them on wire hangers, so you had outdoor mobiles.

Then I discovered that apparently nobody uses wire hangers anymore, ergo they had no old ones to give me. For some reason, I had it firmly in my mind that we couldn't use plastic hangers.

Then I saw another idea, for making sort of creatures out of water bottles by taping/gluing on things. That was somewhere library-related, maybe Pubyac.

So. We had a huge stash of clean, dry water bottles. We had acrylic paint, left over from the messy crafts painting and planting project. We had foam bits, paper bits, googly eyes, sequins (lots and lots of sequins - I bought those in bulk) popcorn (uncooked), glue, tape, ribbon, string, a few hangers, and foil bits.

We had fun! We were very messy! We discovered you can make streaks by globbing a little paint at the top and then patiently letting it run down into the bottle. We discovered if you put some popcorn or something in the bottle with the paint and shake it (with the lid on of course!) it makes a nice splatter pattern. We discovered if you open the bottle after putting the paint in and shaking/streaking it, moisture gets in and it doesn't ever dry. The paint part was actually quite tidy. The acrylic paints had little squirty tops, so they didn't go everywhere when you put the paint in (I just got the paint from Wal-Mart). The glue was actually the messiest part. That and the sequins and popcorn that *somehow* got everywhere!