Ema and Adia are spending lots of time with me this summer, just chillin, havin fun, learnin some stuff and makin some art. So far, I think we are using this first week to get used to each other, test limits, and figure out what we want to do for the rest of the summer. It’s been interesting and … I am very tired each evening. I think they might be too. I think that is a good thing.
I promised the girls I would teach them how to make blog posts, so every once in awhile Ema and/or Adia will be a guest blogger here on Water::Earth::Wind::Fire. I hope you enjoy their posts. At first, I will take dictation, typing pretty much exactly what they tell me to type. At some point, I will let them do the entire post. So, here goes, with the girls’ first ever blog post….
Ema writes:
We wanted to make something nice for my mom’s office, so we made these tiles. We saw these on Pinterest, and we saved them to our summer fun Pinterest board and this is one of the projects my sister and I both wanted to do this summer. This was a creative and fun project. I would recommend this to children and their parents. To do one tile it takes about 5 minutes. Well, after you get everything set up, it goes really fast.
We made practice tiles first and my favorite one turned out to be my practice tile (that’s my practice tile, below.) It was my favorite because it had a lot of bright, different colors. I would describe the design as 3 different colored wax seals (like the ones on old envelopes) laying on top of each other. I really like that.
Here are the three tiles Ema made to go together as a triptych:
Editor’s note: Ema’s sister, Adia, made the list of supplies and wrote the instructions below:
How to Make Strawmania Painted Tiles
Supplies You Need:
- Rubbing alcohol
- Alcohol inks
- Ceramic tiles
- Paint brushes
- Bendy straws (or any kind of straw, but Adia says they should be bendy)
- Q-Tips (cotton swabs)
- Newspapers
- Modge Podge
- Felt circles
- Hanger thingamajigs
- Permanent glue
Instructions:
- Put down newspapers so you won’t get ink all over the place
Brush rubbing alcohol onto the tile. Use a lot. - Take your tile and paint rubbing alcohol all over it. Use alot because it dries up fast
Drip little drops on ink on the tile right into the rubbing alcohol - Drip ink on the tile in little drops
Blow the colors around with a straw or just let them do their thing - Use your straw and blow to make the dots expand.You can play around with the straw blowing to make really cool designs in the ink. (editor’s note: Adia and Ema invented this technique and Adia named the technique, “Strawmania.”)
- You can use a qtip to make shapes
- You can add more colors
You can add more colors to your tile, blow them around or just let them mix 
Add more colors and blow them around - You can drip more rubbing alcohol to make really cool effects in the inks
- Next, let your tile dry
- After it’s dry you can add more ink colors, or you can add more alcohol and play around with it.
- When it’s all done and totally dry, you paint it with Modge Podge so the inks don’t disappear. Also to make it shiny. Also to protect the ink design
- When the ModgePodge is dry, you turn the tile over and put the felt circles on the corners (you need these so it won’t scratch your wall or your tables or tile)
- Then, glue on the hanger thingamajig with really good glue
Above is Adia’s finished triptych of tiles for her mom’s office. Adia writes:
My favorite part of making the tiles was Strawmania. That is what you do with a bendy straw when you blow through it onto the tile. It expands the ink blobs. You can blow colors together and mix them. Sometimes the color goes wherever it wants to go, which looks cool sometimes and other times it makes a big grey blob. If you get a gray blob, you can always add more alcohol and then add another color to make it colorful. That fixes it. This is something I will probably want to do again. Next time I will use less colors so my tiles don’t get big gray blobs. Here is my favorite tile (below). I am squirting the ink on it:
