Little House in the Big Woods: Thimble Pictures

The snow kept coming in till it as drifted and banked against the house. In the mornings the window panes were covered with frost in beautiful pictures of trees and flowers and fairies. Ma said that Jack Frost came in the night and made the pictures while everyone was asleep... Laura and Mary were allowed to take Ma's thimble and made pretty patterns of circles in the frost on the glass. But they never spoiled the pictures that Jack Frost made in the night.

-Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder

picture from The World of Little House, by Carolyn Strom Collins and Chrstina Wyss Eriksson

Making thimble pictures sounded like a fun thing for the boys to do, but we don't have any frosty windowpanes yet, so I cut out the center of a Manila envelope to make a window frame.

Student's "thimble" picture of Pa Ingalls

I experimented with using some parchment paper for the frosty windowpane, but the paint wouldn't adhere to it. We ended up just using plain white paper.

I set up a little Styrofoam tray with a little cup of water, an eye dropper and a little bit of tube watercolor paint.

I had the boys add water a few drops at a time until the paint was a thin consistency. My thimbles are packed, so I gave the boys some tops from 2-liter soda bottles. These made the circles larger than a thimble would, but they had fun making  pictures out of circles...

and they could imagine making pictures by pressing thimbles onto frosty windowpanes.