Comments (18)

By Mom Unplugged, April 13, 2008 9:33 pm

I confess that when I picked the theme food for this week’s Unplugged Project, I had potato stamps in mind. I have never tried stamping with potatoes and have always thought it sounded fun. But we got so into it, and since I was cooking pasta for dinner, we tried a few pasta stamps too!

Here are the materials:

First I asked each child what they wanted for a stamp. I told them to keep it simple! My daughter wanted a moon and a star. My son wanted a spiral.

These sounded manageable so I cut a potato in half and began carving using a box cutter to draw the initial outline on the potato, and then a kitchen knife to cut away the unneeded portions. Since my children are only 7 and 5, I did all the cutting (although my 5 year-old son would have loved to have gotten his little hands on the box cutter!):

This can be a bit tricky. The star lost a point and became a rather lopsided four pointed star. I lacked the mental energy to really figure out the spiral, so it became a mushroom. My son didn’t mind. My advice: keep it simple (especially at first) and use potatoes that are as firm as possible. Ours were a bit old and soft. That’s my excuse and I am sticking to it!

I blotted the stamps with a paper towel to remove the excess moisture. Using a paintbrush, we then painted the stamps with paint and printed pictures and patterns on card stock. The kids made cards for their friends. I just had fun.

Then I got adventurous and decided to try a roller effect. I peeled a whole potato and carved a rectangle on two sides, and more of a square/dot on the other two to create what I hoped would be a cool rectangle-dot-rectangle-dot pattern when rolled across the paper. I painted the rectangles blue, and the dots yellow, then rolled it on the card.

We all thought that the final result looked great! Final photos show this card.

After this success, I was really into this stamping thing and found some dry pasta in my pantry with interesting textures (I was cooking pasta, so pasta naturally came to mind). I used a rotini (twisty corkscrew pasta) and a penne (a tube with small ridges) to make a few more cards. The penne was subtle, but made a nice grass effect. The rotini was fun and drew “oohs and ahs” from my children. There are so many different pastas out there, I suspect that at sometime, you might see some more pasta stamping at Unplug Your Kids!

Here are the finished cards. First the kids’ cards for their friends:

And mine. First my potato cards (the one on the left was created with my “roller potato!”):

And then my pasta and potato cards. The blue, widely-spaced lines are the rotini pasta. The green grass is penne pasta.

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If you did the food Unplugged Project with us this week, then please link to your project post in Mr. Linky below. If you didn’t join in this week, but would like to, we’d love to have you with us! Simply read about how the Unplugged Project works, and jump right in.

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Next Monday’s Unplugged Project falls right on the first day of TV-Turnoff Week. What a dilemma! Since I actually post my weekly project Sunday night before I go to bed, I guess I am OK (I might not be quite as prompt a visitor though). But for those of you who like to do the project and post on Monday, if you are participating in the TV-Turnoff Week Blog Challenge you are faced with having to sit it out, do it early or late, or do a quick Monday post. I’ll leave that decision up to you and plan a project for next Monday anyhow.

The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project is:

Scissors

This is in honor of Michie who has been longing for a scissors project for quite some time now!

What can you create with scissors? If your little one is too young for scissors, then you can do the cutting and your baby can do the creating! Remember, even one tiny snip “counts.”

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For those who did the food project this week, here is Mr. Linky:

Comments (7)

By Mom Unplugged, October 21, 2007 9:07 pm

Last Monday I proposed that any interested bloggers or readers come together for a weekly group children’s art project: The Inaugural “Unplugged Project. “

The “assignment” was to go outside with your kids and collect natural objects with interesting textures, then dip those objects in paint and use them as stamps to create art.

My kids had a great time with this. We did it when a friend was over to play, so all in all we had kids ages 7, 6, 5, and 21 months, plus two Moms (we couldn’t resist giving it a try ourselves).

The kids went out with baskets on a beautiful, sunny fall day and came back with pine needles, pine cones, leaves of various sorts, moss, twigs, rocks, and flowers. We poured paint onto plates and then they had at it! I gave them brushes also, in case they wanted to use them to spread paint on the objects instead of dipping, or for adding other “art” to their work.

Here is a photo of our session, plus the results.

Even the baby did one. Much to my horror, some of the paint ended up in her mouth…but it was labeled non-toxic and was manufactured in Canada of all places, so I felt much better! Here is my 21 month-old baby’s masterpiece:

NEXT PROJECT:

Now we need an Unplugged Project for this coming week. If this idea works out and we continue it regularly, I hope that you all might email some suggestions from time to time - I will surely run out of them soon! Next week, since it is almost Halloween here in the US, I choose this project:

Decorate a Small Pumpkin

Supplies:
- a small pumpkin (or big if you want!)
- paint and brushes

Have your child decorate a small pumpkin with paint. Leave it up to them. Younger children will want to just dab on paint. Older children might have a plan for a face, animal, design…whatever! If you don’t have a pumpkin, how about drawing one on a piece of paper and letting your child decorate that?

I will put a post up with a Mr. Linky next Monday morning - October 29th (or late Sunday night). Email me by Sunday night with photos if you don’t have a blog and want your photos online (unplugyourkids “at” gmail “dot” com).

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I hope this was enjoyable for everyone who took part and that you will join us again. Please remember that if you do not have a blog of your own and want to participate, simply send me your photos and I would love to post them here.

Also: If you want to join us but have been too busy to follow the exact plan, that’s totally OK! This is supposed to be fun. Please post whatever you and your little ones come up with this week no matter what it is!

If you took part in this week’s project, please put your name and link in Mr. Linky so we can all visit each other and see what the kids came up with. Enjoy!