Rainbow Snowflake Banner to brighten up the winter blues

 You know that feeling when you see a really great idea but you want to put your own twist on it to make it yours? Well that was me yesterday. I saw THIS awesome banner...Isn't it pretty. I love it!

I like to take inspiration from ideas I see and try to turn them into something of our own. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea! Lets make a banner with rainbow snowflakes on it to add some colour to this white winter wonderland we live in here in Ontario. Brilliant right?

We started by making our snowflakes out of bleeding tissue papers. My girls love making snowflakes. We usually make them out of coffee filters (see how to make simple snowflakes on our original post HERE ).

I wanted a rainbow of snowflakes though to brighten up our days. I considered dip dying coffee filter snowflakes with liquid water colours and then decided on the bleeding art tissue paper.

 When our snowflakes were all cut out we cut out banner shapes from white construction paper. The triangle shapes used in my inspiration post would have wasted too much paper as our snowflakes were a bit too big so we made larger flags with a rounded edge instead. Then we painted the flags with water.

 Then laid the cut out snowflake on the wet paper and covered it with another layer of water.

 The colour bleeds out of the bleeding tissue paper and leaves a print of the snowflake in place when you remove the tissue paper cut out.

Meanwhile we plugged in our hot plate to warm up and set out some new crayons to soak in water to make it easier to peel them. The longer you leave them in water the easier it is to remove the labels and after 20 minutes they started to actually peel themselves.

Our hotplate is old and doesn't have a temperature gauge but my girls are used to using it carefully. Make sure to have a discussion with your children about hotplate safety and do not leave them unattended with a warm hotplate if you try this activity.

When your hotplate is warm give your child one of the snowflake flags to colour while it is on the hotplate. The crayons melt like magic and it really is a different experience then regular colouring.

When they were finished we added some olive oil to the snowflakes to make them more translucent.

 The oil soaked into the paper though leaving a line around the edges of the snowflakes. The painting with olive oil was a bit boring for the girls or we may have painted more of the backgrounds with oil as shown on the red snowflake. It looks much better but they lost interest at this stage.

Now that they are finished and it hangs in the living room window...it looks OK but certainly not as grandious as I originally envisioned. Perhaps not an epic fail but definietly not a masterpiece.

Have you ever had a great idea that flopped? Did you try it again to see if round two did better with changes?