This week

This fortnight has been kinda crap. Winter arrived in a blur of rain, cold and illness. Normally I like the colder weather but conjunctivitis, cold and coughs have been a plague upon my home... 

Anyway doing these posts can be a nice reminder of the things that have gone right in a week that was on the lower end of OK. 

We painted twice. I made dish washing liquid paints.

 I microwaved frozen blueberries and used the juice for the purple. The brown colour is ground cloves, and the blue is good old fashioned food colouring. 

In the end Bug just mixed the colours together and tipped them everywhere. Which is where the genius of this paint really happens, after a clean up with hot water my dining chairs have never been so clean! 

We also used the plant based glob paints. They smell delicious!

We baked zucchini cake which was delicious.  I used raw almond meal instead of the chopped nuts and I think it would be even more delicious with toasted nuts as per the recipe.

And these sweet potato chips, the only downside is they take over two hours to make and I could eat an entire batch in two minutes.

Next I will have to try these apple chips.

Painting Play

The warm days are slowly fading, as is Bugs time as our one and only. To take advantage of both I decided to play about with some home made paint. I used this recipe from Learn Play Imagine, which uses flour, dish washing liquid and food colouring.

I liked that it's 'toodler made'. And Bug had fun squishing the bag, although I think I should of given it a good squish after because it was a bit lumpy.  Bug didn't seem to mind though, the texture was thick and gloppy which is pretty appealing for eighteen month old. 

We used blue and red food colours, but I decided to use turmeric for the yellow, just to experiment with natural dye options. It worked quite well and makes a lovely yellow speckled subtly with rusty orange.  I'll have to do some more natural colour experiments soon. 

Arg! Little toes, always so cute! 

With the dish washing liquid as a main ingredient cleanup was easy and fun (bubbles). I think Bug may have preferred the cleaning up part more than the painting part but whatever keeps them happy right? 

This is a close-up of our finished work a few weeks later, I love that retains it's texture when dry.

Facts and figures:

While its homemade, the dish-washing liquid makes it uneatable (although non toxic if they do sample a bit) so this is definitely a toddler recipe and not for babies.

Can be whipped up in less than 5mins and costs next to nothing. 

Clean up is quick and easy and just as fun as the painting. We got a 2 lukewarm buckets of water, and under her painting smock Bug was just in a nappy and singlet so she could get as wet as she wanted. Once she'd given everything a good rinse in the first bucket we washed them again in the second bucket, then I checked all our brushes and plastic plates to make sure all the paint was off, I let everything dry before packing away for future painting use. There is a warning on 'Learn Play Imagine' not to put the paint dishes straight into the dishwasher as you may get bubble overload.

I didn't keep the paint but Allison says that if kept in an airtight container it should keep for a couple of weeks. 

We found a great set of painting sponges and rollers from spotlight.  Don't restrict yourself to just paintbrushes - sponges, corks, even leaves can make fun and interesting alternatives for spreading paint about. 

 

Have fun!

 

*K*