Kid Friendly Fireworks

4th of July is almost here again. Just four more days away.

We had originally thought that we'd be spending this 4th of July holiday in Canada waiting for our new visas to be issued. As it turns out, the recent floods in Calgary (where we were booked in for our visa appointment) caused the US Consulate to close down for over a week - right when our visa appointment was booked. For now we're waiting to hear back from the consulate with a new visa appointment. Unless the consulate can squeeze us in early this week (and we can manage to rebook flights, accommodation and car hire at such short notice), it looks like we'll be here in Berkeley to celebrate 4th of July. 

In preparation for celebrating 4th of July the girls and I spent this afternoon up on our roof deck creating some red, white and blue crafts.

Our projects for today: kid friendly fireworks...

Ava with one of her fireworks creations

We made fireworks paintings using two different techniques I found on Pinterest.

First up we made fireworks painting using pipe cleaners, paint, glitter and black card. You can find our inspiration here on jugglingwithkids.com.

I twisted pipe cleaners together into a star shape and the girls used them to stamp paint (red, white and blue of course!) onto black card. Once they were done stamping the paint on we sprinkled glitter over the top and left our fireworks to dry.

This technique ended up a little messier than I had anticipated. We found that we had to push the pipe cleaners down with our fingers which resulted in paint covered fingertips. This wasn't so bad for me but the girls were a little messier and spread quite a few paint covered fingerprints around!

Dipping the pipe cleaners into the paint

Ava stamps down a firework

Time for a little firework

Adding a little sparkle

Despite the mess that the girls made, their creations did come out looking like sparkly fireworks. Very festive!

Sparkly fireworks on our wall

Lola's sparkly fireworks

Our second technique for creating fireworks paintings was a little easier for the kids to handle on their own. All we needed for this project was paint, glitter, card and cotton swabs. My inspiration for this technique came from innerchildfun.com.

We stuck with using the black card again to look like a black sky. I swirled red, white and blue paint onto the card in a circle and gave the girls each a cotton swab. I then instructed them to use the cotton swab to spread the paint from the inside of the circle out creating a firework effect. Once they were happy with their fireworks we sprinkled glitter on top. They both really enjoyed this technique and had a lot of fun making their fireworks.

Ready to start 

Ava always looks so serious when she's creating artworks!

The girls work on their fireworks

Lola's started off as a spiral

Ava adds some glitter to her fireworks

Voila! One sparkly firework.

Lola works on her fireworks

Lola was pretty proud of her picture

Ava works on another fireworks painting

Adding some glitter

Another fantastic firework

After making a few fireworks with paint Ava decided to give the glitter glue a try. She swirled on a few different colours and got to work with her cotton swab. 

Swirling on some glitter glue

Note the tongue of concentration!

Almost finished

Kaboom!

We've got some lovely sparkly fireworks paintings to decorate our apartment. I think it's time I got around to taking the Easter decorations off the front door and add a little 4th of July sparkle instead.

Stay tuned to see what else we started working on today.

More red, white and blue coming soon!