Activity #6: Fork-Painted Tulips

Tulips are a flower that came to England from the Netherlands or Holland. Can you find the Netherlands on a map? It is northeast of France and on the boarder of Germany. Tulips came to England in the 1630’s, and became extremely popular among the wealthy. This was called the era, or time, of “tulipmania”. People were crazy over the flower and planted them in many of their gardens.

The variety of tulip colors available is amazing – there are so many. Did you have any tulips in your yard this past spring? Agecroft Hall grows 3,000 tulips each spring in its SUNKEN GARDEN. This garden is designed to look like a garden at Hampton Court Palace in England, one of the homes of King Henry VIII! The tulips at Agecroft have a short blooming life of about 3 weeks. Maybe you can visit us next April and see them!

Gather your supplies for Day 1, Activity #6 to create a painting celebrating the beautiful tulip.

Steps:

1. Paint stems and leaves on your paper with green paint. Tulips have long stems and long leaves. You can paint a vase to put them in if you want.

2. Choose one color of paint and dip the curved side of your fork into the paint. Stamp the paint onto a tulip stem by laying in down and pushing on it very lightly, rocking it slowly up and down.

3. Clean your fork with water and dry it with a paper towel.

4. Choose another color and make more blooms. Do this as many times as you need to add flowers to each of your stems.

5. When you are finished with your tulip painting, try to create other flowers on a new piece of paper. Use different items as stamps – spoons, Q-tips, crumpled tissues and anything else you can think of. What other flowers did you create?

Activity source: supersimple.com