China in the Nude

In Minneapolis there is a funky little area called Uptown. And in Uptown there is a fun little shop (or was, don't know if it's still there) called China in the Nude. Before you make lewd assumptions, it is a paint your own pottery store. Erik and I went there a few times at my request (he's inclined to call anything artsy "arts and crap"). It was fun.

Today, we had our own version of China in the Nude. We've been studying China in homeschool. My kids are getting to be experts on Qin Shi Huang Di, The Great Wall, Terra Cotta Warriors, the Yellow River and the Yangtze. So we've done a few activities to learn about all this, and today it was "painting fireworks." Why? Well, the Chinese invented fireworks. They invented pretty much everything except the internet which was, of course, created by Al Gore. They invented gun powder (supposedly) and happily used it to power their fireworks. Then the made the fatal mistake of offering their gunpowder to the British, thinking that they could all shoot off fireworks together. And the British took the gunpowder and put it in guns and shot the Chinese. Or so the legend goes. I could be making all of that up. I have been known to do things like that. I guess you'll just have to google it to find the truth for yourself; you can believe everything you read on the internet. But not necessarily everything on this blog.

But all that has very little to do with our craft. The kids had straws with which to blow paint which in theory should shoot out in every direction looking like fireworks. That's what the craft book said. But instead, it just spread in a big puddle. When I saw that the force of their blowing wasn't constricted to the paper, I made them take off their clothes. Hence, china in the nude. Yeah, it's a stretch, but it made me think of the original store. I confess I took pictures from the back and planned to post them, but decided against it for various reasons which are probably obvious. And thus ends one of my weirder posts. (is weirder a word?)