Picnic Day 2025

I always have a great time at Picnic Day, the annual open house at UC Davis. This year was extra fun, as our Scout friends Logan, Avery, and Bobby joined us. They'd never been before, so we were able to introduce them to maggot art, popcorn shelling, and all of our other favorite Picnic Day traditions. And Trevor showed us something that even Steve and I hadn't seen before -  the third-floor greenhouse in the Sciences Laboratory Building where he'd had for BioSci classes. It was a great day. 

Picnic Day 2025 (affiliate link)

For this challenge, we had to use one of four sketches for our layout design. This is the one I chose: 

As you can see, I increased the size of the photo block in order to include five pictures. There isn't a spot for journaling on the sketch, so I swapped out the flowers for circles that could hold my journaling. 

This is a very rare layotu of mine that has absolutely no white. I almost always mat photos with white and I frequently use white to house my journaling. I like this color combination and I'm happy with the completed page. 

Coloring Book Place Cards

The adult coloring book craze is still going strong and I'm frequently asked what people can do with their completed images. I've turned mine into faux stained glass and an altered pencil box. Now I'm turning them into place cards for Thanksgiving.

Leisure Arts recently sent me their latest coloring book and two different marker sets to try out.

I fell in love with the page that was full of cute owls. I colored them in with the double-ended markers and the gel pens, then cut them out with my beloved microtip scissors. 

While I was coloring and cutting owls, these three were coloring as well. 

Look how pretty the pens are, all spread out on the table. 

My assistant coloring book and pen testers had lots of feedback for you. They liked the coloring book images a lot and thought the fall theme was a lot of fun. They felt that some of the designs were too detailed. They'd prefer more variety, with a mix of simpler and more detailed images. They liked that some pages were full scenes, while others had individual elements, like the owls. Overall, Bountiful Wonders Color Art for Everyone got all thumbs up. Affiliate link here and below. 

The kids had nothing but great things to say about the gel pen set, except that they wished it had a brown. Other than that, it has gorgeous colors, including glitter, metallics, and fluorescents. They wrote well and added a beautiful touch to our drawings.

The double-ended markers were a hit too. The kids liked having the option of the two different tip sizes and loved that the caps interlocked with each other. At first, they couldn't tell at a glance which end was which and didn't like having to open the cap to tell which tip size it was. But Avery noticed that the ridge the cap butts up against is different for the two different ends, so that made all the difference. 

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Coloring Book Place Cards

What you need:

• Bountiful Wonders Color Art for Everyone
• pens
• microtip scissors
• craft glue
• white cardstock

How to make it:

1. Color the owl images with the pens. 
2. Use microtip scissors to cut out the images. 
3. Cut and fold the cardstock to make place cards. 
4. Glue one owl to each place card, then write the guest's name. 

Or, set up a coloring station where guests can color their own owl! I'm a firm believer that any get-together can be enhanced with some crafting. 

Amish Buggy Art

Trevor's classmate, Avery, loves to craft. She happily accepted our invitation to join us in doing the activities from the Little Passports Ohio State Journal (affiliate link). Ohio is Avery's home state, so it was really interesting to learn more about a state neither Trevor nor I have visited from someone who has lived there and has family throughout the state.

Avery had never seen Little Passports before, so Trevor was really excited to show her everything that comes in the monthly kit. She was impressed... and even more so when I told her that you get two states for only $12 a month! Once the kids had gone through all the items in the package and flipped through the pages of the Journal, they were ready for the art project called "Visiting Amish Country." 

The Journal teaches how to draw a horse and buggy in 8 steps, and provides a blank page for drawing it. Because two kids and a mom can't draw in one space, I thought it would be fun for the three of us to make the project out of construction paper rather than just sketching it. Here's mine:

Materials: construction paper (black, white, browns), pencil, scissors, glue, markers (brown, black)

We started by following steps 1-4 in the Journal to sketch the horse on brown construction paper. (I drew mine from the opposite side of the table so I could take photos of the kids; every once in a while, I had to zip around to the other side of the table to figure out a step!) We drew in the facial features, mane, tail and hooves with a brown marker. 

Then we sketched the buggy (minus the wheels) on the black construction paper using steps 4-8. We cut out the pieces, tore a strip of the other brown to use as a dirt road, then glued the road, horse, and buggy into place. We'd each sketched our items a different size, so the next step was an epic search for appropriately-sized circles for the wheels on each of our buggies. Trevor found a salt shaker that was just the right size for his. 

Once we'd drawn the wheels, we added the harness with the brown marker. Here's their finished artwork! Isn't it great?!

 

Trevor's:

Avery's:

We put our art aside and jumped into the Ohio science project, called "Make Your Own Whistle." I'll share it with you tomorrow.