I first started seeing posts about this activity last summer, and thought it looked really neat.
With Valentine’s Day approaching, I’ve been seeing this technique used to make marbleized hearts, and thought we’d give it a try today.
Ok, this is SO COOL. It’s right up there with painting with credit cards, which is also one of my new favourite ways to paint.
It’s really simple, you’re just going to have to gather a few materials and set up before you get started.
ignore the toilet rolls - I thought we'd incorporate them somehow, but we didn't need to
You’ll need a baking sheet, shaving cream, some stir sticks of some kind, several colours of food colouring, paper (we used thin white cardboard, but regular paper is fine), and a piece of stiff cardboard for scraping.
Squirt a generous helping of shaving cream onto your baking sheet and spread it around to fill the sheet (I used my piece of stiff cardboard for spreading).
Drop several drops of each colour of food colouring onto the shaving cream.
Have the kiddos stir and swirl the colours around. This is soooo neat. I was reminded of those huge suckers you get a the fair or the circus.
Once you’ve swirled your colours thoroughly, lay your paper (we used thin cardboard) on top of the shaving cream, and gently press it in.
the other side of this cardboard is plain white
Lift it off and let it sit for a minute.
Then take your piece of cardboard and scrape any excess shaving cream off to reveal your gorgeous marbleized paper!
I was seriously impressed. This is one of those things that you’ve seen all over the web, but you don’t experience the wow factor until you actually do it yourself.
My pictures don’t even do justice to how beautiful the results are.
I wasn’t really sure where we were going with it, but while our creations dried, I came up with a plan.
I cut hearts of all different sizes out of the marbleized sheets, and then cut a long thin strip out of another piece of cardboard, and the Hooligans glued their hearts to the thin strip.
Now they’re ready to tack up on a wall or in a window.
Have you tried this technique? Do it!! It’s so cool! It’s a little messy, yes. But the kids had fun mucking around in the tray when we were finished, and asked if they could wash the farm animals in the shaving cream.
Then I filled a big container up with water for them to wash up in. That led to them wanting to play in the water, so I refilled it with clean water and added some blue food colouring,
and that’s how they passed the rest of this dreary winter morning.
