Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Homemade Finger Paints

I've had these homemade finger paints in my "Need to Try" box for quite a while now. I originally found the recipe on Pinterest. Here is the original recipe, like always, I added a little something to make it my own!

The original recipe wasn't very clear about how long to cook the mixture for, or about how long it would take to thicken, so I doubled the recipe to ensure that I would have enough goo to make six colors of paint. **The original instructions did not work for me, but I have them listed below. I also have listed the final instructions that I used to successfully create the paints.**

I started by gathering the supplies:

Supplies:
6 small glass jars with lids (glass baby food jars work great)
Small Saucepan
Spoon
Large Measuring cup
Powdered Food coloring in a variety of colors
Baby Wash

Ingredients:
3 Tablespoons Sugar
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1/2 cup Cornstarch
2 cups Water

<Original instructions> Combine ingredients in a small saucepan and warm until mixture thickens. Cool and pour into containers. Add coloring to create desired colors.

 Sugar, Cornstarch and Salt Mixture 

Powdered Food Coloring (Lebensmittel Farbe)

While my ingredients were "warming", I took the lids off of the jars and added 1/4 teaspoon of powdered food coloring (Lebensmittel Farbe) to each jar. I used red, orange, yellow, blue, green and purple.

After allowing the mixture (which still was not thick after cooking for 40 minutes) to cool, i added about 150ml of the mixture to each glass jar. It immediately mixed with the powdered food coloring and became a very vibrant, still liquid, mixture. I added 1-2 drops of liquid baby wash to each jar and then left it to sit, cool and congeal. An hour later, it was still completely liquid, so I sat the jars in a glass dish and added boiling water to the bottom. Let's see what happens next!

After 15 minutes sitting in the boiling water, the finger paints were still completely liquid. I thought I'd try the oven next! Haha at this point I was just too stubborn to give up. I used all of my cornstarch by making it a double batch and I was determined to have some finger paints for Alexa to paint with. The oven didn't work either (Shocker!).

I finally came up with a Hail Mary pass and it worked!


<My Instructions: that work!> Combine ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil on medium-high heat. Once the mixture is bubbling for 10 seconds, remove from heat and stir rapidly while the mixture thickens. The mixture will be a little thicker than store bought finger paint. Pour into jars with food coloring and allow to cool. Final paint mixture, when cooled, will be a little chunkier than store bought finger paints, but the additional sensory stimulation while painting is really fun for the kids!





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