plasticine stamp printing

This is going to be a bit of an epic post as far as photographs go. We had a lot of fun messing around with lumps of plasticine and an old stamp pad, and I figured you'd probably like to see a load of examples of what went on, to give you lots of ideas. I've always been rather fond of rubber stamps and my kids love playing with rubber stamps too, but they are expensive, and so we only have a set of upper case and lower case alphabet ones from their great grandpa Norman and a couple of random cheap plastic ones. If you are like us and want a cheap and creative alternative to an expensive rubber stamp collection then this might be just right for you.

I started off not with plasticine at all, but with a few of the red wax wrappers from babybel cheese. I was wondering if we could use them to make our own stamps with, so I smooshed them onto a lone Jenga block and made some patterns in it.

It worked, but the wax was a bit too hard for the kids to comfortably make the shapes they wanted, so I got out the box of plasticine that we use with goggly eyes to make creatures (remember from this post from April last year?) The kids still played that game inbetween all the stamping fun. Here's the "circle time with a teacher" that my four year old made :) I think the plasticine we used was Rose Art, but it's so old that I'm not entirely sure. That's something else that I love about plasticine - it's virtually indestructable (unlike playdough, which we use for many crafts, but would be awful for this one). This plasticine is at least two years old and still going strong. I have fond memories of our primary school's plastic tray draw full of gnarly lumps of grey playdough that must have been at least as old as the teacher :)

The plasticine was much much easier for the kids to manipulate into the stamps that they wanted. I had a lot of fun with this too! The stamps that you can make in this way have an interesting property to them, in that the more you stamp them, the more the shape changes because the plasticine is so pliable. That might seem like a disadvantage, but it actually gives things a really nice organic flowing and unexpected feel that I quite like. No two impressions from each stamp are exactly the same.

I suppose if you wanted to have a stamp that remained the same for many impressions then you'd just have to stick it in the fridge for a bit to make the playdough harder. I kind of like how temporary these are though and that you have to keep making more from the older ones.

Here are a few examples...

I made the leaves and petals and stamped a sunflower with them, which Carys coloured in. Ffion had a go at making her own sunflower.

Carys asked for me to make her a sun, so I made five stamps, one for the rays (you can see how the shape changes during multiple stampings quite well from the rays of the sun), one for the mouth, one for the eye, one for the nose and one for the eyebrow. Later on she painted it beautifully and it's now up on our wall in the livingroom. I love the texture of how the ink applies to the paper with this!
We also tried rolling out a layer of plasticine onto some scrap wood for the kids to draw into and print from. That worked out really well too. We dabbed the stamp pad all over it and then squished the paper on top.

In the afternoon we stamped the kid's names using impressions from our fridge magnets. We smooshed the magnets front face into the plasticine and pulled them back out again to make the backwards letters that would print the right way around. Then we decorated the edges of each letter stamp.

The cool thing about stamping the letters in negative was that the kids could colour them in with pencils after.

We cut out a lot of our experimental stamps and they made collages and coloured them too.

Once the kids were in bed I had a play around with the plasticine and stamp pad myself and made some postcard note thingies. I'm liking how instant and yet temporary this process is. You can't make more than a couple of cards before you need to fashion a new stamp, so even though you are stamping, each card is unique. I think I might splash out on a couple of different coloured stamp pads now. White would be very cool to stamp on the brown paper! Totally a grown up craft as well as a kid craft!

Whilst writing all this up I thought I'd go have a look on the interwebs to see if anyone else had posted anything about stamp making with plasticine and to my astonishment there was only one thing I could find. A post here on Paper Crafts for Children, showing one stamp used with paint. This technique is so much fun and so flexible and open ended that I figured surely we wouldn't be the first people to wonder about experimenting with it, but there you go, so that's why I decided to put so many images in this post. You should so have a go! Using the stamp pad with the plasticine doesn't ruin the plasticine either in case you were wondering.

We've done a couple of other unusual printing techniques over the years. In case you are interested, here are a couple of links to them.

1. Printing with laser cut felt shapes (last year).
2. Printing with foam shapes on rolling pins (two years ago).

Happy stamping!

Craft foam bath murals

If you've been with us for a really long time then you might remember these outside paper and water murals from when the kids were quite little. This craft foam bath mural project works on the same principal. Just surface tension, which is great, because it means everything is able to be used again and again.

We don't have many bath toys, but this activity has shown no signs of getting old, because there are endless creative possibilities! I'm quite lucky in that whenever my friends get kid's craft kits that involve craft foam, they always give me the left overs :) My house has become the repository of unwanted random bits of craft foam and that's really handy for bath time!

I know you can buy chunky foam bath "stickers" that adhere to the tiled walls or side of the tub with just water due to surface tension, but they are pretty limiting in that they are all pre printed themed pieces, so there's no creating for the kids beyond imaginative play with the set they have. What you want is a load of brightly coloured regular craft foam. Not the self adhesive backed stuff, just the cheaper plain old stuff. The Dollar Tree often does decent sized packs with a few colours in and really, the cheap thin stuff is the best because it's easier for the kids to cut and is lighter, so the surface tension keeps it where they put it for longer. If I leave the mural up after their bath in the evening then only about half of it has dried to the point where it falls off into the tub by the morning!

Sometimes I cut out sets for the kids to use like the monster set that you can see below...

Other times I use up random left overs like the insects and flowers for the garden set. The kids like to be able to cut their own pieces too. The only rule is that if you're holding the kid scissors then you're sitting down. Some of the pieces like the monster eyes are drawn on with sharpie pen and they hold up pretty well to getting wet. If you have any of those shaped punches meant for scrap booking then you can get a load of good shapes quickly from those. I only have a punch for making rounded corners, so we just hand cut stuff with the children's safety scissors.

You can go geometric and abstract with shapes (this one is a city on a planet in a binary star system)...

We've also got a set based on the Duplo word blocks from a while back.

For younger kids the alphabet might be popular with lower case on one side and upper case on the other?

You don't even have to be having a bath at all, you can just give them a bucket of water to dunk the shapes in and they can stand in the tub with it cutting shapes themselves.

The kids think it's really funny to be sitting in a tub of craft foam soup, and it's easy to clear up. I just store the sets under the sink in the bathroom in ziplock bags (I don't close them though, because I guess they might get funky if they were still a bit wet and sealed shut?) Because the foam floats, you just need to scoop all the little bits off the surface of the water before taking the plug out so you don't have them escaping down your plug hole and blocking the drain.

There are loads of possibilities with this, even for older kids. They could make board games to play on the sides of the tub, or their own poetry set like the magnetic fridge ones you can buy. My youngest daughter up until she was two years old would have just tried biting chunks out of the pieces though, so I guess there's a lower age limit to this unless you can find really thick craft foam to cut yourself.

Some of the themes we'll be going for in the future are things like numbers so we can practise addition and subtraction, along with circles for counters. I think my girls would really enjoy having all the internal body parts cut out with name labels to construct the human body too. Paul suggested robot parts, which I think they would LOVE! Cut out country shapes to fit together a world map? State shapes for a US map if you're American? Tangrams? sections to build wiggly tracks around the inside of the tub that you can drive your toy cars around on like one of those vertical wheels of death? You're only limited by your own imagination with this!

Rolled newspaper pirate swords and pirate girl bandanna skirts.

I've been invited by Isabel over at Alphamom to write another guest post over there, so with "Talk Like a Pirate Day" coming up on September 19th, I thought we'd go for some swashbuckling fun!
I've been making these pirate swords for the kids for over two years now and they never grow tired of them. It was only a couple of months ago that I figured out how to make the twirly eight pointed bandanna skirts though. Being a hand sewer, I'm always looking for ways to avoid hemming garments, and this method is a big time saver in that department! Turns out the skirts and swords go together very well for some low budget and very cute pirate girl fun.
To find out what you'll need, and for step by step instructions showing how to put these two projects together, pop over to Alphamom. Here's the link.

Yaaaarrrrrrr!