Im looking forward to taking Emma to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle soon. I’m especially excited for her to go into the Butterfly garden there.  It’s sooooo cool. 

With that in mind, we decided to make her own butterfly garden that she could hang on her wall.  This project took a couple of days, just because of paint drying time.  Here’s what we did…

You can get canvas’s pretty cheap at the craft stores now, so we started by paining a canvas green with acrylic paint.  Emma was REALLY excited to paint on a REAL canvas for the first time.  🙂

Then she added some pom poms (not sure what those are, but I think it has some relation to Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), mushrooms and flowers to her “garden”.

She set the canvas garden aside to dry overnight.  Next step called for watercolor paints.  We used Crayola.

She painted two peices of regular white card stock paper with them.  This is going to become your butterflies so make it colorful.

Paint one side, and let that dry an hour or so.  Then flip it over and do the same to the other side.  You want both sides painted so that both  the top and the bottom of the butterfly wings are colorful. 

Once both sides are dry, it’s time to punch out the butterflies. I didn’t already own a butterfly punch, so I purchased this one at Hobby Lobby (with my 40% off coupon – yay!.)  It ended up being about $7.

Once you punch them out, fold the wings up to give them kind of a 3D effext.

Emma got pretty creative on a couple of her butterflies but didnt have the patience to do all of them. (I have no idea where she gets her lack of patience…it can’t be from me).  😉

We used Tacky Glue on the “body” of the butterfly to glue them to canvas. Make sure you use a glue that dries clear.

I put the glue on, and Emma placed them where she wanted them on her garden.

Here is her finished butterfly garden, ready to hang on her wall.