Craft Ideas
How to Make Puffy Paint
Now that the girls are home for the summer, we’ve been on the hunt for fun and easy crafts to help fill the long summer days. And homemade puffy paint was such a fun experiment for us to try! To tell you the truth, I’m not sure we did it right? But it still ended up with the coolest texture! So in my opinion, this stuff is fool proof! Even if you don’t measure the exact amounts when you make it, you still end up with a really neat texture!
It’s super easy to make and the texture is so neat! I love that it’s just 3 simple ingredients:
- Shaving Cream
- White School Glue
- Food Colouring
Mix equal amounts of shaving cream and white glue until you have the texture you want.
Pour a generous amount of the white glue into a small bowl or container.
Add an equal amount of shaving cream to the bowl. Just guess with it. You can’t really mess it up. I think I added too much shaving cream, but it still turned out.
Add a few drops of food colouring to the mixture. Keep in mind, that as the puffy paint dries, the colour will get darker, so don’t be too worried if it looks too light at this point. I added about 10 to 15 drops of food colouring into each of our colours.
I really didn’t want this stuff on our kitchen spoons, so I used straws to stir them all up. A stir stick or popsicle stick would work well too.
Repeat the process for as many colours as you’d like.
Since I wanted to make a rainbow, we made lots of colours and even made a bowl of plain white for the puffy clouds. As far as painted clouds go, you really can’t get a better cloud texture than this!
And then when it dried, the colours were way darker.
After we finished the rainbows, we painted a bunch of balloons.
I started by drawing the strings with black pen, and then generously dolloped a big circle of paint on the end of each string to make the balloons.
Bubble Blower Painting
POP! There is something just so magical about bubbles and my girls LOVE anything bubbles so when Immy came home from school recently declaring the bubble blower painting that they’d enjoyed that day was the most awesome activity ever, we just had to give it a go!
It really is so simple, we used just two ingredients – bubble mixture and food colouring – and my girls made painting after painting and stayed engaged and busy creating for a very long time.
You will need:
- Bubble mixture – we used a commercial mix from a bubble blowing set (similar to this one) but I am sure this would also work with a good quality DIY mix
- Food colouring
- Bubble wands
- Cups and/or trays to dip your wands into
- Large sheets of painting paper
To make:
- Simply tip a little bubble mixture into each tray or cup – one for each colour, and then add a little food colouring to each tray and stir gently – you don’t want to make too many bubbles in your cup because we always find our bubbles don’t work so well when the mixture is all bubbly. We used red, blue, yellow and pink.
Then it’s time to blow bubbles! All over your paper.
The activity is a little messy but our mixture did not stain at all, in fact it was really easy to clean up. We actually took it outdoors as I didn’t fancy bubble shaped splashes on my walls from the stray bubbles that my girls couldn’t help but blow up into the air I would suggest wearing art aprons and covering work surfaces.
The effect the bubbles make on the paper is amazing and the experience was lots and lots of fun!
Meal mat
This great art and craft activity will have the kids wanting to sit at the table all the time! Help them make their very own unique place mat and you won’t be able to get them off the table even after meals have been finished!
What you need:
- gift box or poster board
- clear contact or laminate
- crayons
- markers
- glue
- magazines or other source of pictures to choose from
Activity:
Cut the box or other piece of cardboard to the desired size for a place mat.
Encourage your child to decorate the mat however they like – draw and colour, glue on pictures from magazines or even bits from the garden.
Let them add their name and even the year for the perfect future memento.
Cover the place mat with contact paper or have it laminated.
Follow this with a quick lesson on setting the table and your day is done!
Watermelon Paper Plate
Materials
- One paper plate
- Acrylic paints (red, white, green, and black)
- Paintbrushes (one thick, one thin for the seeds)
- Newspaper
- Stapler
- Scissors (optional)
Instructions:
- Fold the paper plate in half.
- Paint each side like a watermelon. Use our picture for reference. Let dry.
- Hold the folded paper plate on one side, stuff with newspaper, and staple shut.
Note: You can also cut the paper plate and half and after painting it, staple it all around, which is what we did. That way both sides dry at the same time.
That’s it! Piece of cake…or should I say watermelon?
