Painted Mosaic Styrofoam Tile Picture Frame

June is the month of Father's day and birthdays.  Chuck and I wanted to make gifts for hubby and my parents, so we made these mosaic picture frames out of painted Styrofoam plates and cardboard.

I'm so glad with how they turned out.  They're happy and colorful and made out of stuff that we had right at home.

Making a bouncy ball

Sometimes when Chuck naps (and the dishes are washed, and dinner is cooking on the stove), I get the urge to make stuff.  Yesterday I pulled out a whole bunch of strange ingredients and made this blue bouncy ball.

In case you didn't know, Chuck has now moved on from bubbles. Bubbles are  out.  Bouncy balls are in.  It's so cute, he sometimes even requests to sleep with a ball (or two) at night.  Hrmm.. I wonder what he dreams about.

To make this homemade bouncy ball, I simply combined glue, food coloring, Borax, corn starch, and warm water according to these directions.  Then, voila, a bouncy ball emerged within minutes.  (With my unkempt hair and nails, I felt very much like a mad-scientist while stirring the ingredients together... muah ha ha ha)

It wasn't quite as bouncy as the store bought ones and tended to lose its shape over time.  (But no problem, we just remolded it back into a sphere.)  Here's a video proving that it did indeed bounce:


P6125854.AVI from Pink Stripey Socks on Vimeo.


Chuck bounced it around for a couple minutes, until... uh-oh, he went all Hulk on it and tore the poor thing it two.


P6125863 from Pink Stripey Socks on Vimeo.

RIP bouncy ball.  (Have you tried making your own bouncy ball?  It seems like a fun activity for older kids to do.)

Make Sidewalk paint out of cornstarch and food coloring

Looking back through the archives, I noticed that Chuck and I have quite a history making homemade paint.  

• It all started back in January when we made our own cornstarch toddler paint.  
• Then, we tried our hand at marbling paper with shaving cream and paint.
• And most recently we made our very own homemade water color paints (and then actually used them to decorate a wedding card!)

Well, now I've got another homemade paint experience to add to the archives.  Yesterday we played in the park with several friends, so I brought some homemade sidewalk paint for the kids to try:

Want the exact recipe I used?  Errmm... let's just say that I took a pretty intuitive approach.  (There are lots of lovely tutorials out there sharing exact measurements and ingredients, so you can just google those.)   

I took the lazy way out and simply mixed cornstarch and water together until I had a whitish liquid that had "paint-like consistency." Then I added about 10 drops of food coloring to make each of my three colors.

The payoff for my relatively little amount of work was pretty awesome.  The kids had a blast painting the pavement.  (In all honsty, I was pretty surprised that the activity went as well as it did.)  The colors were quite bright when they first touched the pavement, but they became a pale pastel when the paint dried

Wet paint shown on left

.    

Pastel paint when dried

The little guys sat still for at least 5-10 minutes  and painted away. (Whoa!  That's like years in toddler time) There was some serious street artwork going on there. 

Oh yeah- if you try this activity out with your kids, try to keep their hands out of the paint.  It stains.  Somebody's hand got into the blue paint.... and well... let's just say that even after several washings, it's still slightly blue.  Eeek!  Smurf baby.

With all the lovely warm weather rolling in, I'm looking for some fun and cheap activities that are easy for toddlers to do. Got any ideas?  I'd love to hear them.