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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Rainy Day? Craft Away! (Updated)

I'm always looking for something easy, cheap, quick, fun and not too messy to do with N. A tall order! I ran across a neat website called HowDoesShe? that has lots of craft ideas as well as recipes and articles on mommy-type stuff. I've found a few nifty things on there so far. One of the crafts that I ran across was this sidewalk chalk recipe. It looked easy, and N had a birthday party to go to soon and I thought it would make a good gift. I did end up modifying the "recipe" a little to make it less messy and easier to clean up.

You will need:

2/3 cup water
1 to 1 1/4 cups plaster of paris
sandwich sized ziploc baggie
ice cube tray or silicone candy mold tray
scissors
food dye
toddler or pre-schooler


1) Pour water into zip loc baggie and add food dye.
2) Add about half of the plaster of paris and seal baggie with most of the air pressed out.
3) Give to wee one to squish around until the plaster is thorougly mixed in.


4) At this point, the mixture will be very watery. Add more plaster until it is about the consistency of pancake batter. The pink set used a little over 1 cup of plaster and the yellow used about 1 1/4 cups. You can see the difference in how thick the mixture is. Both set up fine.

UPDATE: After popping out the chalk, the thinner mixture turned out much better. The chalk had no bubbles in it and the tops were smoother. I really like the home made chalk better than the cheap store bought chalk becuase it's much denser, so it lasts longer. The store bought chalk looks like it's made from a frothy mixture, so there's lots of air bubbles in it. Nothing wrong with it, but goes quickly. I need to get some more interesting molds, though! Also, the chalk only really works on sidewalks. It doesn't work very well on an indoor blackboard.


5) When you have the mixture at the thickness you want, snip a corner off the baggie and fill your trays.
6) After a few hours (or a nap!) flip ice cube trays upside down and pop out your chalk!


Here's the set I made for Z's 3rd birthday party. I got the boxes and basket at Rite Aid, and N decorated them with princess stickers.

The best thing about my modifications to the original recipe is that there's MINIMAL CLEANUP!! Just toss the baggies, wash the mold and you're done. I also like the small sized batches, this lets N pick lots of colors and squish lots of baggies. Her squishing made me a little nervous, so I'm definitely going to invest in some name brand baggies. The ones I had were from the dollar store and I didn't have a whole lot of faith in them holding up to her enthusiastic participation.

We had lots of fun today, even though it was rainy and chilly out. Now I just need to find something good for next time...

2 comments:

Brynn said...

i love that nora and dory's gift to zora was literally handmade! it's so thoughtful. she (and kellan) will have a blast coloring the deck and sidewalk. i'm going to check out that website. i'll need stuff like that to keep me, um, THEM busy this summer! thanks again for coming. hope your girls came down off the sugar high okay!

Lauren said...

she loved making it, and it kept her amused for awhile. win, win! we had a blast, and i thought overall the girls were on their best behavior. at least, for them it was! if i run across any other projects, i'll pass them along to you.