Kai Projects: Carefree Crafts Day

When I initially signed up for a monthly craft subscription, I tried three different companies. We continue to get my favorite, Carefree Crafts. When Kai was home every day, we had to ration the projects with other homemade projects. But with Kai starting daycare, spending more time with Maurico, and finding favorite homemade crafts, we've fallen behind. We spent today binging on Carefree Crafts.

Here is Kai, wearing an old Carefree Craft we had to move to make room on our drying rack downstairs:

We started with a homemade craft - an oil and water mixture with glitter and food coloring:

Then our first Carefree Craft, from the December package, Kai is stringing buttons on a pipe cleaner to make a candy came ornament (You may notice the gingerbread houses in the background, a sure sign that we are a bit behind on cleaning up our craft area.):

Next, a waterless "snow globe" ornament:

After we woke up from naps, we moved into the January, winter wonderland, package. We made this handy penguin ruler for measuring snow...too bad we don't get snow here:

Here, Kai looks thrilled showing off the chalkboard sled and the ruler again:

We made snowflakes from coffee filters, markers, and water (still folded up in this picture):

Here, a snowman coaster:

And finally, a mitten window hanging:

The worst part? There were more crafts today that I didn't get decent pictures of. It was a craft filled day. 

Kai Project: A Jello Play Dough Assembly Line

Kai's going to school some days now, so today was our first day together since Christmas break. Her first request? Jello play dough. We have an assembly line process to make five colors of play dough. 

We only use about a third of a box of jello, the rest goes into salt shakers we use for other projects (jello is a fun powdered paint or food coloring for just about anything, and I love the way it smells). First we mix the ingrediants in a pan:

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup flour

1/3 package jello

1 T oil

1 T salt

1 T cream of tartar

It looks like this:

Kai watches me cook the first batch, but while I'm cooking later batches, she works on the previous color. Stirring over medium heat, the mixture will turn into a ball like this:

I find this part really odd. If the heat is too high, you may get clumps. You can either stir faster or turn the heat down and stir until smooth. It will still turn into a ball in your pot. I turn out the ball into a bowl with about 1/2 cup of flour:

While this is cooling, I wash the pot and Kai prepares the ingredient for the next batch. She is able to pick the next color and open the package of jello. I help measure the rest into the pot for her to mix. While I cook the next batch on the stove, she kneads the flour into the ball. Or rather, she "folds it in half, smushed it flat, and sprinkles flour on top" as I repeat these instructions... But she's learning. 

And the end result?

Five balls of delicious smelling play dough and one flour covered munchkin making crazy faces at me. 

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: Rainbow Bread Butterfly

Today's food project selection was a butterfly made from a slice of bread, cream cheese, and fresh fruit. Substituting what we had on hand (and what Kai likes), we used rainbow bread from yesterday, peanut butter, and dried fruit.

After I trimmed the rainbow bread, Kai spread peanut butter:

The finished project:

Kai Projects: Flour paint

We started with simple flour and water:

After transferring the mixture into our bottles, we added food coloring:

Kai painted outside (for easier clean up):

She wanted "glitter" for her surprise for Grandpa, but I talked her into using baking soda and citric acid (if I haven't written about my purchase of 10 pounds of citric acid, I should). We put it in a spice container I saved for crafts:

The results have been entertaining. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to post a video from my phone. I'll have to see if I can add those later. 

Kai Projects: Rainbow bread

Kai has been fascinated with "food projects" lately. We look through Pinterest together to find things to try. Her first (and most frequent) selection is always felt cut into food shapes - I guess that pictures best. But I've been able to guide her toward edible projects for which we already have the ingredients on hand (important because I'm still on crutches).

To make rainbow bread, we first mixed food coloring with milk:

Kai "painted" the colored milk on bread:

And I toasted the bread in our toaster oven:

She loved it!

Unfortunately, I'm still somewhat disturbed by colored bread. I remember when they started selling tie-dyed white bread in the store when I was a kid. I think my mother's distress at this product carried with me. 

Kai Projects: Salt Painting

We saw this salt, glue, and food coloring project on Pinterest. Kai and I decided to try it. Using glue, we drew patterns on paper. We sprinkled salt on top of the glue. We initially tried using the food coloring directly on the salt, but it did not spread as much as expected. So we mixed food coloring with water and used a straw to drip it onto the salt.

Kai's:

Kai's attempt with a bit of help from Courtney:

Courtney's:

Mine:

Yes, I don't draw, I doodle. I learned from the best. 

Bath Bombs

Courtney and I made bath bombs last night. She bought some at LUSH - Kai, Courtney and I all enjoy them. The recipe here looked easy, so we tried a variation of that recipe. I ordered an enormous bag of citric acid from Amazon (10 pounds, we will either be making a ton of bath bombs or Kai and I will be doing some interesting "experiments").

When I gathered the ingredients last night, Bryce was skeptical of my intentions. When I got out the wonderful tare weight scale Craig got me, Bryce decided I was making "blue candy" and I decided he's been watching far too much "Breaking Bad." The rather interesting thing about using a scale was that I dumped the 1 pound box of baking soda into the bowl and discovered that the box actually had 17.5 ounces baking soda. I adjusted the recipe accordingly to keep the proportions the same.

We mixed 17.5 ounces baking soda, 8.75 ounces citric acid, 8.75 ounces of Episom salts and 8.75 ounces corn starch in a big bowl. As Courtney whisked the dry ingredients, I squirted scented baby oil in until we had a consistency we thought would work (this seemed easier than finding essential oils and other bath oils...but it also resulted in extremely oily bath bombs...we have plans for more experimentation on this part of the process). We used old plastic Easter eggs as molds, filling only the larger side and popping them out as we went. As you'll see in the picture, we added food coloring for about half of them.

I took a bath with two last night - the fizz didn't last long and the water became extremely oily. We will explore different oils and maybe adding water (I'm wary of water because whenever Kai and I use it in our "experiments" using this same reaction, we have trouble adding small enough amounts).

Because I'm not in love with this batch of bath bombs, I let Kai play with several in her bath today. The shape of the bath bombs sparked a great deal of imagination play. She cracked an "egg" (one of the white bath bombs) into the bowl where she was making pancake batter and chopped up a "tomato" nearby:

After she added the purple bath bomb to her batter she added a bit of water:

She had a great time playing with the bath bombs, but I told her next time we would have to do these experiments outside. She and the bathtub were so oily I had to put her in the shower when we finished. I think we could make different colored "bombs" and have fun outside outside with a squirt bottle of water, bowls, and the like.