Oh bubble wrap. I love you.

The boys and I decided to add jellyfish to our ocean, and I wanted them to be AWESOME. Lots of texture and pattern and color and movement. These things are all that and more.

To start, I cut a bunch of paper plates in half. Jackson decided he didn’t need a nap again so it was jellyfish time. (Hmm… maybe he’s figured out we do projects when he doesn’t sleep. Forehead slap.)

We taped a huge sheet of bubble wrap on the deck. (Please excuse the condition of deck. That’s on the Next Year list. It makes a super art studio though, and if we can’t rebuild it right now, we might as well Crayola it!)

Once we mixed a bunch of fun colors (always an awesome conversation during a painting project), we rolled paint onto the bubble wrap, then pressed the paper plates onto the wrap to make prints. If you push really hard you can even make the bubble wrap POP!

I LOVE the patterns it created! The more paints we added and rolled, the more the colors mixed, and my favorite prints came toward the end of the project when all sorts of new colors emerged.

Once we had printed all of our jellies, Jackson burned some energy doing a bubble wrap dance. Look at those tootsies!

After the paint dried, we hole punched a line of holes along the bottom of the jellyfish and added varying lengths of yarn. I also used ribbon, string and ribbed yarn to add texture. You could knot the strings to keep it more permanent, but it isn’t necessary.

We added a few jellyfish to the ocean wall, and because we loved them so much, hung a few more in the playroom window. Love these things!