Shopping List

Second Childhood Creations is all about creativity with ease, and as mentioned in "About Me", I work with the senior population. That means we're also concerned about toxicity, safety, and other little things that can lead to delight or disaster. So let's keep all of those things in mind and talk about products. Actually, I'm doing the talking.

Whenever I present to a group of activity professionals about "Easy Projects on the Cheap," I supply a shopping list. (The actual name of the workshop is, "Six Creative Projects, the Supply Closet Workshop). This shopping list is what I consider the basics that you add to all those other things you've got sitting around, like wallpaper sample books, fabric scraps, magazines and greeting cards, cotton swabs, boxes, yarn, and various types of paper. Out of this blend comes wonderful projects, which will appear with amazing regularity on this blog. Whew!

So here's the SHOPPING LIST with a bit of details for the various products, such as why I use them, love them, promote them, and get nothing in return from the manufacturers. In fact, they probably don't even know that I'm promoting their wares.

Item # 1 is acrylic paint. I use Blickrylic from Dick Blick, which you can Google and then look at all of their products. I like the Blickrylic because it has good coverage*, lovely colors, dries quickly, and has been formulated for use with school children. If it's safe for the kids it's probably safe for their grandmas and grandpas. I generally recommend purchasing a pint of the brown, red, yellow, florescent green, blue and green. I also recommend a half-gallon of the white. We use a lot of white and mix it with red to get pink, with dark blue to get a lovely baby blue... You get the idea. We use a lot of white.

*A note on the florescent green, which is something you'd eventually find out anyway so I'm just going to confess right up front. The florescent green is a bit translucent and needs a number of coats for really good coverage, but if you add just a bit of white it becomes wonderfully opaque and is one of the favorite colors of our "artists".

One other paint to add to your list for a touch of bling is a bottle of gold metallic paint by Prang, also available from Dick Blick. It looks great over almost any color and gives it a metallic shine. Note: the metallic paint is entirely optional, but like good undergarments, who would want to do without!

For brushes I use the Charles Leanard Brushes that I purchase on the Sam's site. Last price check (Oct 2009) they were 10 for $6.88. They have nice sized handles for easy gripping. We prefer the flat bristles to the round.

When it comes to sticking things together we use two different products. The first is Glue Dots, which is heaven's answer to the glue gun. I am a safety disaster in the kitchen so you can imagine what I can do to my body with hot glue! We purchase the Glue Dots on sheets of twelve. You simply tear off a square and place a circle of sticky wherever you want to add an embellishment. We use them to attach silk flowers or buttons and bows. About half of the residents become quite proficient with the Glue Dots given time and encouragement. For the rest we apply the circle of sticky and say, "Right there. You can put the flower right there. Good job! Now press it in place. Good! It looks wonderful!" Don't forget the praise, encouragement, and conversation. Some days people's lives are just so devoid of these nice human touches. You can make all the difference. Good job!

Back to work. The other adhesive we use isn't manufactured to be an adhesive, but it's wonderful when used as one. It gloss gel, which is actually made so that when an artist wants to express some artistic emotion they mix it in with their paints and can make their paints form peaks and valleys and other emotional type things. (Are you following this? I think I just lost myself!) At any rate, gloss gel is wonderful for adhering paper to paper or for sticking larger objects together with a nice, tight weld. Liquitex makes a great gloss gel and Golden makes the Cadillac of gloss gels. Please note, these are only my opinions, so of course, I think they're accurate.

Finally, get yourself a roll of painter's tape, specifically the 3M 2080. It comes in various widths and can be used to tape over painted objects, which are then painted with a second color so that the object can have strips or squares and look absolutely lovely. It's always a kick when we take off the tape after a resident applies a second color and they see how incredible the object looks with its two-color pattern.

So in a nut shell, my recommended shopping list includes:
Blickrylic Paint - brown, red, yellow, florescent green, blue, green and white
Prang Metallic Paint - gold for sure and maybe silver, which is great over blue
Charles Leonard Brushes
Glue Dots
Gloss Gel
Painter's Tape - 3M2080

Some of the Creative Activities, which will appear on this blog , will use some of these very items! Life just keeps getting better and better!