153) Play Dough Printing

For the last week or so we have been working on Valentines around here. Both girls are beyond excited about what the Bee refers to as "Love Day." We have been making two sets of Valentines one for some family and friends and another set for their friends at school. But since that is a lot of Valentines to make I thought this year we would make a bunch of different paintings and cut them up to use for all the Valentines. So far we have made some Marbled Shaving Cream paintings and some Rolling Marble paintings. But since we are making a lot of them I thought we should try to make one more kind of painted paper. Then I saw this brilliant idea on the blog Childhood 101 for play dough printing! Which was so awesome we had to try it and it was perfect timing because the play dough we had was about done, so this seemed like a perfect way to finish it all off.

We started by taking a chunk of play dough and rolling it into a flat slab with a rolling pin (the Bean needed a little help so I made her slab for her.) Both girls then used a variety of clay tools we have to make lots of textures into the dough. We keep a box of clay tools ready to go some of them are store bought tools and rollers but the favorites are usually plastic forks, knives and straws.

I then squirted some tempera paint into a tray and the girls rolled the paint onto a foam roller. Since we were doing valentines we used pink and red paint. They then rolled the paint directly onto the surface of the play dough. The roller was most definitely their favorite part.

Next we took some pieces of colored paper which I had cut in half and they placed them onto the painted surface of the play dough and rubbed the back of the paper with their hands. We then pulled up the paper to reveal the image. It was so cool to see the patterns they had created transferred on the paper. In some cases the play dough stuck a little to the paper but most of it flaked off once the prints had dried. The bits that didn't flake off left a cool texture to the print which looked fabulous in the Valentines!