Sidewalk Paint

Yesterday after our morning walk, we got a little crafty.  We made sidewalk paint!  I found the "recipe" on pinterest, here, although there are many recipes out there!

You basically add water and cornstarch together (some blogs say a 1:1 ratio, some say 1:2 to make it thicker).  I did 1:1 but the blog I followed also mentioned to add baking soda to the mix to make it thicker.  One other reason this was mentioned was so that after you did the "painting", you could spice it up and add some vinegar to the leftover paint and see the kids reaction to the paint bubbling up.  I'm always up for a good science experiment, so baking soda it is!  After that was all mixed together, I poured it into a muffin tin and then used food coloring to make the different colors.  Ellis was very intrigued by what I was doing, so I didn't get a "before he touched it" picture, but I loved the fact that he was so excited about it.  I gave them some crafting sponge brushes to "paint" but they used their hands for the most part.  Okay, and lets be serious.  They didn't "paint" at all, but they had fun playing with the colors and the brushes.  Here is a look at our mess fun!

I wish I got a picture of the exact moment the paint landed on his stomach.  His reaction was priceless!

This was after I put the vinegar in it - they loved touching the bubbles.

This is the closest Logan got to "painting"...

Once they started to lose interest in the paint, I brought the pool close by, filled it up with a little bit of water in hopes that they would get in and rinse themselves off.  Logan was all for it, and Ellis thought it would be more fun to throw the balls in and watch Logan get splashed.

Needless to say, after a few failed attempts to get Ellis in (and then after he decided it would be fun to play in the sandbox), I ended up giving them an actual real bath in the house once I got most of the paint off and them dried off a bit.

Here is their masterpiece, once it dried.  Of course all the colors were completely mixed together so it didn't surprise me that you don't see any specific colors on the sidewalk.  One day when they actually get the idea of painting, it could look pretty cool!  For now, they had fun and thats all that matters.