This morning while enjoying my morning cup of coffee and catching up with some Facebook posts I came across this great idea:
Thank you to Tina S. from Deltona, FL, miss you neighbor!!!! This just made my day! Here in Massachusetts its a rainy yucky day again. We have had a few nice days that I am thankful for, but this rain? Really? I’m quite fed up with this weather. It’s not even hot enough to put in the air conditioners.
Then I realized today is June 13th, and my 14th wedding anniversary. (((((Happy Anniversary Hunny!!!! XOXOXOXO)))) It rained on our wedding day too, no it didn’t rain, IT FLIPPING POURED, and I swear it rains every year on this day!
Anyhoo, back to this clever find! I couldn’t be more thrilled to find a rainy day project for my 3 year old. It dawned on me that I’ve never given Sebastian paint…nope, what’s wrong with me? So this project was a MUST TACKLE IMMEDIATELY. Normally I would have all the ingredients for this but I just used all of my cornstarch this past weekend for making moon mud. [Another simple project I hope. to share with you this week.] So I wanted to stay home in my jammies today and enjoy a crummy rainy day, but then we had a minor setback to those plans and had to head out to the pediatrician for a minor issue. It looks like I had to venture out anyway, so off to the DR and the store we went.
I had a brilliant idea after first reading this post. How about Kool-Aid to color the paint instead of food coloring? Woo-hoo, smelly paint and awesome colors!
Now I don’t normally keep Kool-Aid on hand so I had to purchase this (5/$1 cheapo!) but I was remembering experimenting with Kool-Aid hair dye in high school. This is a great dye and they have fun colors. It’s a quick way to get a really vibrant red without having to use a ton of food coloring, or buying the expensive concentrated stuff for cakes.
So I mixed all the ingredients up just as the picture describes except that I doubled the recipe and I poured my “paint” into the baby food jars. I am always making extra of everything so that I have more for later. My theory is that I would rather have too much than not enough!
I remembered visiting a preschool, and also having a million friends who were preschool teachers, that if you add a little bit of soap to finger paint it becomes more washable. Please note that I said more washable, NOT completely washable. So you just have to add a little bit or the paint will become too soapy. I think I used about a tablespoon, but you don’t have to measure it, I just drizzled some in.
I began mixing the red. It was cherry! Oh yum!
I started with just a little bit of the Kool-Aid packet and then added a little more because it was too pinky-looking. After adding little by little I said to heck with it, for .20 I can handle using it all and I dumped it all in. I love the look of this! Then I noticed that I had some red dust on my fingertip, and washed it off. Oops, I forgot about the staining power of Kool-Aid. You would think that I would have thought about this when I was remembering dying my hair with the stuff. Nope I didn’t. I added some more soap after this thought. So make that about 2 tablespoons….ish….
This was my green. They didn’t have a green Kool-Aid so I had to mix yellow and blue. I remembered not to add all the blue because it can be way to dark. I couldn’t seem to get the green really deep, so I shifted gears and added some green gel food coloring.
Then mixed.
Don’t these colors look so yummy? You should smell them! Clockwise from the top is cherry, lemonade, blue raspberry, orange, green scented like blue raspberry lemonade, pink lemonade, and grape.
Now I haven’t experimented with Sebastian yet, I’m still waiting for him to get up from his nap. We will see how that goes, I’m kinda scared to be honest. LOL! I think my house is going to look like someone gave Picasso Kool-Aid, but at least the paints smell yummy…
*****NOTE**** this is probably not going to be neat in any way, shape or form. Kool-Aid stains like crazy! Of course I had to be different, me and my brilliant ideas. We’re only kids once right?
I am also thinking about putting glitter in the paints to make it fun too! OOOOO glitter paints!
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Clever Catastrophe 