Crafting - Drawing on Sandpaper

Firstly, I love libraries! You can request them to deliver any book you choose right to your local library. So I had Art Lab for Little Kids sent to the Healesville Library and Lucia and I launched straight into some new creative time.

I have always found crayons a bit useless, they're waxy and the colour doesn't transfer well to paper. We have always used pastels, oil pastels, markers and chalk instead and then voila the great idea of drawing with crayons onto sandpaper. It grates the colour right in, which means you get good colour transfer.  Then you can flip it over and iron onto a fabric! I had some bags left from an embroidery project that we did a test run on and it worked a treat (other than my drawing the y in lucy backwards)!

Why I Love Food Dye: Six Ways To Entertain Kids With a Few Simple Ingredients

I have discovered a new and abiding love for the extensive use that you can put food dye to in your house when you have little kids.

Playdough 

I had a lot of food dye around from dyeing yarn when Lucy was born and when she got old enough I thought it was great that we could make our own coloured playdough. Home made playdough lasts so much longer than shopbought and I use this recipe and it feels great and lasts for a couple of months if sealed up between plays.

Coloured Baths

At some point Lucy was protesting about getting in the bath and so I added some colour to the water, just a half cap is enough to colour the whole bath and it did not dye her skin at all. We experiment in the bath by adding a colour at either end and seeing what happens when they mix, so we are learning through play. Also a coloured bath can make an enchanting setting for some water play with underwater animal toys etc. 

Coloured Bath Soap for Kids  

I have looked around for bath soap pens so Lucy could draw on the expanse of white tiles next to our bath without luck and at the suggestion of a friend I added some corn flour (starch) to some baby soap (you could use liquid handsoap for older kids), split the mix in half and added some food dye and voila! bath soap that you can paint on the walls or tub with the added benefit of getting a clean baby. Special note that I did dye my grout but it came out after a few scrubs

Pavement Paint for Kids

We made paint by mixing one cup of water with one cup of cornflour and spliting it into four bowls and mixing in some food colouring. BRILLIANT! This is my favourite thing to do with food colouring and Lucy loved it too. We got the idea from the Tend website. The colours blend together brilliantly when wet and then change colour to a more opaque/chalky texture as they dry and you can just sweep/hose off the results. We didn't have any residual dyeing on our cement pavers.

Ice Cube Painting

On a hot day you can freeze some water that has been dyed with food colouring and then pop it out and let your kids use it like a paintbrush. This is another great chance to see colours combine and observe the result. Something simple and cheap that can keep kids entertained and cool on a hot day. 

Finger Paints

We did make home made fingerpaints which I posted about here, but they were no where near as fun as the pavement paints, which you could use as fingerpaints if you wanted to, but not for paintings you wanted to keep.

DIY Fingerpaints

I have been looking for some non toxic kid friendly finger paints around the traps and hadn't come across any when I saw this post on Easie Peasie for DIY fingerpaints. I had some cornstarch talc lying around that we got when Lucy was newborn but never used on her and the other ingredients are salt, sugar, food colouring and water. I have great food colours thanks to dyeing wool with the Ravlery Rocketeers. My friend Char from the Sunrisesister blog gets them from a local indian grocery and they come in brilliant sized bottles for not too expensive a price.

So we cooked it up and it was great, it's quite thick when it cools and I don't think that you would use it if you wanted to keep the paintings forever but for sheer fun and frivolity and some tactile learning I give it the big thumbs up and it's totally edible because lets face it, one year olds put EVERYTHING in their mouths.

If you wanted to go really au natural for your little bubba I did find a link for some Australian made natural food colours which I'll be trying out (they also make 100's and 1000's).