The Pantry Goods

creative spaces, tips, and extra goodies

 

Podcast interview -Art Made Easy: From preschool teacher to art entreprenuer with Megan Schiller of The Art Pantry
March 9, 2016  by

Do you listen to Podcasts?

Are you a fan yet of the blog, Deep Space Sparkle? If you’ve never heard of it, it is a fun, beautiful site packed with incredible art lessons and tons of great resources for teachers and parents.

I have been inspired by Patty’s blog for years and have always admired her- so of course I was thrilled when she asked me to be a guest on her new podcast, Art Made Easy.

Patty asked me to talk about my story of how I transitioned from a preschool teacher to becoming an entrepreneur and designing kids creative spaces. I also give tips on setting up art spaces in the home and putting out “invitations to create.”

If you’d like to check it out, click here to head over to Deep Space Sparkle and you can listen directly from the blog post or listen on iTunes or Stitcher.

Thanks!

in Creative Business / News 2 comments
February 15, 2016  by

Q&A: Toddler Art Exploration And Clean-Up

I’m starting a new Q&A series! I get a lot of questions from readers that I think are universal challenges when it comes to kids and creativity. After sending long e-mail responses to these questions, I realized that I should be posting them here on the blog so that others can benefit as well. So if you have a question, please fee free to send me an e-mail or ask in the comments below and I’ll do my best to post my answers to each of them.

Read More›
in Art Spaces / Art Supplies / Q&A 4 comments
February 2, 2016  by

Big Kid Desk And Art Nook

Do you remember the feeling you had when you finally felt like you were a “big kid”? One thing that always evokes that sense of growing up is having your own work desk. Swapping out an old play table for a big kid desk and some new “grown-up” supplies is a simple way to celebrate a child’s development or a milestone birthday.

I love to help families with this transition, so when a friend hired me to design a big kid work space for her daughter’s 8th birthday, I couldn’t wait to get started. The first time I worked on a big kid makeover project was 6 years ago and it also happened to be for an 8-year-old’s birthday (you can see it here).

Read More›
in Art Display / Art Spaces / Art Supplies / Home / Indoor Creative Spaces / Kid's Bedrooms / Playroom / Portfolio 7 comments
January 7, 2016  by

Layered Canvas Family Project

This layered canvas turned out to be one of my favorite art projects I have done with my kids. It started off as a holiday Advent activity and turned into something we will be doing all year long. The basic idea is to work on one canvas over many days, adding a new material every time. Because it started off as an Advent activity, each material was a surprise, hidden inside of a bag for that specific day. This quickly became a fun game where they would try to guess what the next material would be. If a material didn’t fit inside the bag (like on day 1), I would set it up like an Invitation To Create and surprise the girls that way. Although we tried to do this every day during early December, I quickly realized that it was going to have to be every other day- and sometimes we’d go a few days without working on it. This made it a much more enjoyable experience and helped me realize we could continue on indefinitely! Here is what our process looked like…

Read More›
in Art Projects / Creative Projects / Family Canvas Challenge / Holiday 9 comments
December 1, 2015  by

Holiday Family Art Prompt And Advent Activity

One of The Art Pantry readers, Emily Holzknecht, recently shared with me her family advent art tradition. I absolutely love this Advent activity! Emily creates a bag of art materials for each day of the Advent calendar. On Dec 1, each person in the family gets a canvas and they open the first bag of art materials. They use the same canvas each day and open a new bag of materials to add to their work.

This project is sort of like an invitation to create, advent calendar, & art game all in one. I love the idea of building on the same canvas with surprise materials each day.

Read More›
in Art Projects / Creative Projects / Holiday 3 comments