Kai Project: Puffy Paint

Today, we decided to try this project from Pinterest:

As usual, we edited the recipe a bit. We mixed:

4 cups flour

1 cup salt

1 cup baking soda

4 cups water

It was rather thick and difficult to mix:

After putting that mixture into our bottles (a slightly messy adventure as the mixture was too thick to go through our funnel), we added a packet of kool aid to each bottle. As we mixed, the citric acid in the kool aid had the expected reaction with the baking soda in our paint mixture (that's the reason I added baking soda to the recipe). Several of the bottles came close to bubbling over the top:

By mixing, we kept them from spilling over the top:

The end result is a lovely smelling, puffy paint:

My picture (I'm not terribly creative, but I wanted to try it):

Kai also tried using her fingers to mix the colors together to create additional colors:

Kai Projects: Fun with Shaving Cream

I've hardly posted since Courtney started school, because my time has been filled doing "projects" with Kai. Here are a few of our favorites with shaving cream.

Kai loves shaving cream "paint" - shaving cream mixed with color. She enjoys making the paint, adding the colors, mixing it up, and finding out what color it will be. We initially used food coloring, but that dyed our hands and clothes (and I was worried about dying the pavement in the backyard by accident). We made our own powdered paint out of sidewalk chalk. I bought a big box of sidewalk chalk. We sorted the colors and put similar colors into ziplock bags. Then we pounded the chalk with hammers until we had powder. Here we added the chalk powder to the shaving cream in our craft muffin tin (an old muffin tin that is no longer used for cooking):

It was hard to mix the powdered chalk with the shaving cream. So the next time, we mixed the chalk with water in the tin before adding the shaving cream. This resulted in brighter colors and better consistency paint:

My other favorite coloring agent is Kool-Aid. We've used other powdered drink mixes (as pictured here), but I love the smell of Kool-Aid! Here we've mixed it with water and shaving cream in Kai's squirt bottles (it separated a bit in the picture, but it mixed as she squirted it out):

For some reason, this was the logical thing for Kai to do with this paint:

At least it was a warm day, so both Kai and the pavement were easy to hose off when she finished.