Nicole Alderman

John F Dean wrote:I don’t know the time frame you are working in. If I was in your position, I would contact the paint manufacturer for a donation.  Trust me, they have seconds.  Proceed with the concept of infecting young minds with the hobby of painting and positive vibes for the company.

Over the years I have gotten for myself or others AEDs, vehicles, power tools, and one Viking 6 burner kitchen range.

Sadly, I need it by next week, which is when we're starting the unit. (I know, I know, I should have figured this out months ago, but I'm teaching 4 different courses, and I'm designing all the curriculum, slides, and activities for each. There's too much to do, and not enough time to do it!)

s ritter wrote:I was having similar questions while building out my van... I wanted something non-toxic, easy to work with and affordable. I ended up purchasing 100g of concentrated pigment from Earth Pigments and mixing it with linseed oil and river clay that I sifted, dried and sieved. The color came out as a rich deep teal, and the application was super easy. You can adjust the color by adding more or less pigment, but I found it was forgiving enough that I just eyeballed my proportions when making subsequent batches. I also found that the river clay wasn't necessary, so for the simplest approach you could just mix pigment and linseed oil and start painting! Also - 100g was more than enough to cover a large wall and some cabinetry in my van (~40sq ft) at a pretty rich ratio of pigment to linseed oil.

Attached is a picture of the final product - you can kinda see the striations of the wood beneath the paint, but I find that I like that look!

I love Earth Pigments! I've used it to make milk paint and watercolors in the past (I literally just made some watercolors with it a few hours ago), but I've never made oil paints. How did you mix yours up? The videos I see on making paint always say I need to use a muller and grind the paint to thoroughly mix the paint. But, I mix all my watercolors by just putting the pigment and water+gum arabic+honey together in my watercolor tray, and then I mix it with my brush. Do you think I could do that with oil paint, too? I'm sure it won't be "perfect" like professional artists use...but my watercolors are nicer than anything I've ever bought, and they aren't mulled.

Also mixing the pigment with oil in class will let the kids see how it's done, too! But....oil is thicker than water, so I'm not sure how it'll work. How did you mix yours?

I absolutely love the color you achieved on your wall. It's so lovely!

One of my history classes will be learning about the Renaissance, and I thought a fun way would be to do an oil painting. BUT, the school doesn't have oil paints, and I don't have enough at home to use for 24 students. Plus, I wanted to have a more traditional palette with colors that the painters likely would have had back then. My questions are these:

(1) What colors should I have? (Colors that look like: lamp black, raw umber, red iron oxide, red lead, vermillion, yellow ochre, lead yellow, green earth, malachite green, verdigris, ultramarine, white....I'm probably missing some, too.)
(2) Is there a brand that's affordable that isn't full of fillers and has more historical hues?
(3) Can I make my own oil paint without a muller and that paint scraper thing? Will it work in small batches if we just mix the dry pigment powder with the oil? I already have a lot of historical-ish hued pigments.

Tess Misch wrote: If I can get him to write just TWO sentences, I am blessed!  LOL --Tess

It can be so tricky! My son is much the same way. When he was in kindergarten, it was hard to get him to write a few letters. As the years went by, he moved from a few letter being a struggle, to a few words, to a sentence being a struggle, to a few sentences. The key is, there's progress. It might not be as fast of progress as we might like, but it is progress.

I think there's a lot of reasons why writing is harder than other motor skills.

It's slower than thought, so it's easy to lose track of what you're writing. Imagine having to write out letters that are 1 foot tall and having to write everyting at that scale--it would take so long that you'd likely lose track of what you were saying (this is probably why there's so many signs that say "Yard Sard" and "Yale Sale"--it's easy to get lost when you're focused on forming the letters!)

Holding a pencil is hard, especially if you have hypermobility. It can hurt to write.

Some kids like to really push the pencil down hard to get a dark line....this is a lot harder than writing softly!

More practice makes all of these less of an issue, but it's hard to get them to write when they have such a mental block. So, we just aim for as much writing as possible with as little stress as possible...and be thankful for whatever progress they are making!

That's really cool that your grandson likes writing in cursive. I've tried to get my son to do so, but he is not at all interested. He likes deciphering the code that's my cursive, but not interested in writing cursive at all.

Having merino on the top layer does seem to help with a "smoother" (rather than fuzzy) final look. I don't end up using it much, because I'd rather invest in multi-purpose bulk wool colors I can use for both the body and details.

I'm a bit different from other felters, in that I'd rather make an animal out of one color/type of wool, rather than felting a core out of cheaper white wool, and then covering it with another color of wool. The white likes to poke it's way back out, and isn't very useful in the felting thinner things, like dragons.

The last time I worked with Merino was when I made blue Pern dragon. It was a pain to make, because the merino took so long to felt. But, I already had the blue merino on hand from when I first purchased wool roving years ago. As you can see, it didn't end up very fuzzy:



The relative lack of fuzziness is easier to see when compared to the other dragons of Pern:

you can see more pictures in the Dragons of Pern thread

The lack of fuzziness is something many people like about merino. And, some people say you can felt it quicker with a fine needle than with a medium or large needle. But, I heard that after I made the blue dragon, so I haven't tested it out for myself.

Those are so cute! I usually order my wool from weircrafts here in the US. Hopefully someone else can chime in where Canadian sources of wool. I would personally avoid merino wool for needle felting. It takes forever to felt because it's so silky! I usually look for Corriedale or Romney wool.

r ransom wrote:Today's quest has been frustrating.

The goal - find out what ochre and other earth pigments look like in nature.   All I get are ads for buying paint.  

Maybe it's all around me and I'm not seeing it.

Ah! A great source for that is the Ancient Pottery channel on youtube!

This is the video I showed my history students:



He goes through the process of finding where the ochres are and then goes out and shows the different colors of the ochres found in the wild.

Down here, where the glaciers did a big number on our clay soils (i.e. we don't have any), I never see anything like what he's going after.

Another video I've seen showing ochres in the wild is the Secrets of the Castle series by BBC.  It's a lot more wet in France where this castle is being built, so the look of their ochre is more like what we'd probably find:

I managed to download it without any issue. I've attached the file down below (that should also help prevent it from disappearing like so many things disappear on the internet.)

I received these hair cutting scissors last Christmas, and I have found them quite sharp. I, however, do not have thick hair, and usually use mine for trimming split ends. When I trimmed my son's hair (which is thicker), I didn't have any issues.

Previously, I've also cut hair with my Gingher fabric scissors, and I'm pretty sure my mom trimmed my hair with Fiskars fabric scissors.