Homemade Watercolors

Amy from the Mom Advice blog posts links to fun crafts and do-it-yourself projects each week in Amy's Notebook. Recently she had asked us to join in with Notebook Experiments by picking a project to do and then linking back with pictures and specifics.

This week, we made homemade watercolor paints (Dim Sum, Bagels and Crawfish) which were featured in last week's Notebook(8/21/08).

I love making my own art supplies like play dough and finger paints so these quickly caught my eye! The next drawing point was that they could be made in minutes and used right away. No cooking and cooling periods. When you take care of two 2 year olds, immediate gratification is of utmost importance!

I had all the supplies on hand-another plus.(Please see the original post for a complete instructions.) I set out the ingredients and we got right to scooping and counting! The baking soda and vinegar combination was very cool-the fizzing really fascinated the boys!

The boys helped with the stirring by using these small Pampered Chef spoons-the perfect size for little ones! Just like the instructions, I divided the paints into recycled applesauce cups, since that's what I had on hand. I stirred the food coloring into each one and viola! We had paint!


We had so much fun with these. It was a short enough project that could easily be completed with antsy little ones. The leftover paints are hardened up now to use again soon. And their very wet paintings dried up really nice into beautiful pastel colors. This recipe is going into my toddler activities book to be used over and over again!

(I had a picture of all 6 colors of paint in their cute little applesauce cups, but it refuses to load for me! Oh well... enjoy the pictures of the littles having a grand time painting!)


Click here to read about more fun experiments or join in the fun!