Painting with "snowballs" (cotton balls) was one of the things I thought I would try during our 'Winter' theme this past month. At the same time I found a recipe for a homemade puffy paint that I decided to use for our paintings (recipe below). It was a fun little activity! The kids were super excited - as always - to paint. At first both were a little unsure as to how to use the cotton balls as make-shift paintbrushes!
Little A never really caught on to the "dipping" motion of painting - choosing instead to spread the paint around by rubbing the cotton ball over the paper - which was quite effective in coating the paper with colour but didn't result in the "puffy" look when we set the paint in the microwave. Wee Man did fairly well with the dipping, but used so much paint in the process! His final result was a little puffier, but the paper was so wet it took about twice as much time to dry! ha ha.
Needless to say, I was happy I chose to use our finger painting paper for this craft session, as the paper held up well through all of it! To 'set' the puffy paint (and make it puff up a bit) the recipe said to microwave it while wet, so as the kids were finished I stuck them in the microwave. When they were dry (about 30 sec for Little A's artwork and 60 sec for Wee Man's) I helped them glue on their cotton balls to make snowmen (or "soooom" as Wee Man seems to call them these days). While the kids were having their snack, I finished the snowmen off by adding googly eyes, noses, mouths and arms and they were so excited to run around with the paintings for a while. Here are the final results:
For the puffy paint, this is the recipe I used:
1 cup flour
3 tsp. baking powder
3 tsp. salt
water to make a "thick paint" consistency
food colouring
- To set the paint and make it puff up, place the works of art in the microwave for 30-60 seconds.
*Notes: I think I used a bit too much water - and I put in about 1/2 cup. My paint didn't puff up as well as the original posting on Momstown.ca showed (see link on the right). Since this makes tons I decided to just go with it, but next time I will add it tiny amounts at a time and play with different consistencies. Mine was fairly runny - still worked, but not as well as it likely could have!
I also found that the paper curled in the microwave (I did a tester first to try it out while the kids were still painting). I put some small microwavable cups on the edges of the kids' artwork in the microwave to keep this from happening to theirs and it seemed to help! My paper was curled almost in half while the kids' were just a little bumpy. The paint dries puffy, but also hard and can crack if you try to bend the paper.
Today I opted to keep our activities at home (due to an injured foot on my part), so I thought it would be a good day to try something like the Cloud Dough (also mentioned on Momstown.ca). How cool was this stuff!?!
To make it you need 8 cups of flour and 1 cup of baby oil. Combine them together and it makes dry - but mold able - "sand". The kids (and I!) loved this one!
I thought it was pretty cool that we could make "sand castles" with the dough and the kids loved dumping and scooping this - in fact, this is the longest I've had them playing nicely together at one activity all year! They were content to play for about an hour, and probably would have continued but we needed to get cleaned up so we could get a quick snack in before Daddy came to pick up Little A!
We had some cups, spoons and pots (yes, all Discovery Toys!) to play with in the sand - all of which have stencils on the bottom for stamping. The Cloud Dough, when compacted flat, allowed for us to see the patterns of food and animals on the bottoms of our pots and cups (the kids thought this was pretty cool) and the spoons when filled made little lady bugs from the imprints on them. Unfortunately the photographs didn't turn out well, but the kids thought this was a pretty neat trick and had lots of fun making bugs and pictures in their sand - as well as dumping and filling the containers.
Warning for those afraid of a mess: this is not an indoor activity if that is the case. This was messy!! There was Cloud Dough from one end of my kitchen to another. The good thing about this stuff is that when swept up together you can clump it and almost pick it up (or easily scoop it) into a pile to transfer back to the original container, but because of the Baby Oil used in making it, my floors are a little slippery tonight! Next time I think I will put a tarp down under our table for a quicker clean up! Also, the kids were wearing aprons - which was a good choice, because I chose not to and ended up having to change after we were done as I was covered in flour from head to toe!
The Cloud Dough is not oily or greasy, and feels soft and dry to run your hands through. Definitely a cool activity, and one we will continue to do over and over!
*Notes: Because it uses regular white flour those with a gluten intolerance or Celiac Disease will need to find an alternative flour to use in their recipe, and those who have little ones with this type of allergy visiting their home should also do the same if choosing to use this activity at a birthday party or play date. I used Johnson's Baby Oil in ours because we had a bottle of it on hand. As someone sensitive to scents, I found it a bit much after a while for me, but the kids didn't seem bothered by it at all. Since this batch of Cloud Dough will likely last us a while I'll just deal with the scent, but next time I go to make a fresh batch I think I will attempt to find an unscented baby oil to use as an alternative. I really strongly dislike the scents in Johnson's Baby products.
As I read through the other activities on the MomsTown.ca link, I am excited to try out the Silly Putty, too. That one looks awesome, as does a link my aunt posted on her facebook page of homemade finger paint. The groundhog predicted another 6 weeks of winter in these parts last week, so I guess we may have time to go through some of these inside boredom busters before Spring hits and we can move outside to playing in the garden and water (although I can't complain about the weather as of late - it's been pretty nice out here)! How do you get through the stuck-inside days? I'd love more ideas...
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