Hey Everyone.  I haven’t said it lately.  Thank you so much for reading my blog! I am so grateful for all of your comments and questions and support. THANK YOU! Sincerely.

In other news, it’s the jewish holiday of Sukkot.  Sukkot is a joyful, harvest holiday celebrated in autumn that I totally love.  Many families build a sukkah, a temporary building covered in nature and festive decorations, to eat and sleep in.   We usually turn our art playhouse into a sukkah this time of year but we’ve been on a trip to NY to celebrate my 40th (woo hoo!) so Sukkot has kind of taken a back seat this year.   We did manage to create this amazing fruity garland at art class last week and the kids absolutely loved making it! Read below to see what it’s made of.

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It’s a sculpey garland! Yup.  One of my very favorite art supplies is sculpey.  I’ve done tons of crafts with this fantastic polymer clay, including seven layer cakes and sculpey finger puppets.

For this project you will need white sculpey, my secret weapon craft machine (pictured above), tempera paints (these are my fav, fav, fav) or watercolors, a skewer, ribbon or ric rak and fruit cookie cutters, sharpies optional

I am telling you, kids can play with this craft machine for hours.  They absolutely love it.  It’s very professional and turns the sculpey into a smooth silky tongue shape that you can do all kinds of crafts with.  For the garland, the kids (age 5,) put the white sculpey through the craft machine and then used the cookie cutters to create different shapes.  We had a star and butterfly shape in there too, just for good measure.  They easily peeled the excess sculpey off the cookie cutter and set it aside.  Then they poked a whole through the shapes with a skewer.  I had a tray for each child to place their cutouts on.  Once we had about six or seven each we baked them in the oven.  Baking directions are on the back of the packaging.  Be careful.  Every oven is different and a few of ours got burned this time around.  It was okay though.  We had an “artists chat” about going with the flow and problem solving.

Once all the fruit was baked we painted them.  These are my absolute favorite paints.  I’ve been using them more and more and just love them.  The colors are fantastically bright and neon.  Some of the pics show my sample garland where I tried out sharpies and watercolors.  The watercolor paints just kind of stained the sculpey, which was cool, but I prefer the tempera paints.  The sharpies were fun though and added nice detail to the fruit.

Gigi loved the garland but was more into wearing it as a necklace.  Fine by me when I get a smile like this.

You can string the fruit onto ribbon or rik rak.  They both hold the fruit in place which is great.  You may need to put a little tape on the end of it to get the ribbon or rik rak through the wholes.  Then just string em up.  No sukkah necessary.  They are really cute just about anywhere.

If you like this project, check out these awesome sculpey necklaces.  Super fun! Thanks for reading along and Happy Sukkot, even if it’s a little late.