Aquarium-inspired Craft

I have been thinking about an ocean-inspired flannel board for a while now, ever since we did the felt Christmas tree with felt decorations.

After our trip to the aquarium, Esther's enthusiasm for fishies grew, and I was motivated to get back on track with this project. Here's the big picture:

And a zoom-in...

And another...

For this project, I grabbed one or two of each of the solid colors of felt at JoAnn's. They were having a 4-for-$1 sale, good deal! Then I grabbed a bunch of colored Sharpies and drew shapes, mostly with dots.  There are a few solid lines, but very few. You can see the faux-pointillism in the pic above, with a textured starfish and randomly-shaped reef.

Aquarium Trip

A while back, we went to the Baltimore Aquarium with family friends.  Esther loves fish, and raved for days about the "silly dolphins" who splashed us and gave us "mess hair" during the dolphin show.

This inspired me to get to work on a project I had been thinking about for a while... you'll see it tomorrow. For now, just a few pics from the day.

This is Gram, family friend, Esther, and FF's special teddy bear. This was the outside-under of the dolphin tank.

This is Esther busily adoring some turtles. We watch "A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventure" quite frequently on Netflix, a cute eco-friendly, kid-friendly, not-particulalry-girl-friendly movie that Esther enjoys.  She kept calling the turtles Sammy and Shelly, the main characters of the movie.

Gram took this on her phone. You can see we've been splashed by the silly dolphins. Here's my fearless girl petting some kind of hissing cockroach. It wasn't hissing at the moment, but that dude was huge.  And a cockroach. And she was all ready to pick it up and bring it home or something.