Sylvie's Rainbow Window

One of the blogs I just started reading, Unplug Your Kids, has a weekly theme intended to inspire parents and children to spend some time together away from the TV and computer. I love this! This past week's theme was "glass" and of course my first thought was "well CRAP, how am I supposed to do an activity with Sylvie involving glass?" I thought about teaching her about recycling (boring) or painting on jars of glass (dangerous) and then I came up with (ahem, my internet research stumbled upon) this stained glass craft. Using just 2 things - sticky contact paper and brightly colored tissue paper. I was so excited that we went out to the craft store that same day and bought the supplies.

You place one sheet of contact paper (sticky side up) on the table and the idea is to just let the kids scatter as many different pieces of tissue paper as desired all over the sheet. The more, the better.


Well apparently Sylvie is in the "Less is More" camp, so she stopped at a few judiciously placed pieces. Those of you that know me well can probably hear me saying "Sylvie, are you SURE that's all you want? Look at all these pieces Mommy cut out for you, how about a nice yellow one? Ooh, look at this orange one!" And those of you that know Sylvie know that once she's made up her mind about something there's no discussion. She had completed her masterpiece!

So we covered it with the another piece of contact paper and took our stained glass to Sylvie's room to hang in her window.

She was blown away by it. And I wish I knew how to take a better picture of this, because the colors were just so much brighter and more spectacular in person, with the sun light shining in. Sylvie took one look at it hanging in the window and declared "Mommy, look! I made a rainbow window!"

We've since moved her rainbow window to our kitchen window, where it brightens our day each and every morning!