A great Rainy Day Project for Kids

Yes, it's another one of our famous Liquid Sunshine Days in the beautiful Pacific NW!! That means today we needed to find something fun to do Inside, and At Home, as I'm still getting over the latest batch of creeping crud that has lived in our house for the last month!

So, what to do? While thumbing through one of our favorite cookbooks called "Alpha Bakery Children's Cookbook", I found a recipe for making Finger Paint that looked fairly simple, and we had all the ingredients. Whoo hoo! A few minutes later, and lots of stirring, and we had 6 beautiful pots of finger paint :-)

Before we could begin painting, however, I realized even though this was washable, non-staining paint, I didn't really want it everywhere. So I put an old beach towel on the kitchen floor, threw an old T-shirt of David's on Kyra, and we went at it.

We had so much fun, and the best thing was, because we had made the paints ourselves, I knew if some happened to get in her mouth, it wasn't going to hurt her :-)

So if you're looking for something fun to do with your kids, and you don't mind a little mess, try calling up your inner artist--you never know what you might create!

Finger Paint
Makes a lot!

Ingredients

1/3 cup of cornstarch
3 tablespoons of sugar
2 cups of cold water
Food coloring

Muffin tin
toothpicks

1. Mix cornstarch, sugar and water in 1-quart saucepan.
2. Cook and stir over medium heat about 5 minutes or until thickened; remove from heat.
3. Divide the mixture by pouring into muffin tin depressions--Be careful as mixture is really hot!
   
4. Tint mixture in each depression with a different food color by adding a couple drops and stirring with a toothpick. Stir several times until it's the color you desire and the paint is cool.
5. Time to paint!
6. When finished, you can store the paints in airtight containers, although it works best if you use them the same day as you make it.

I've also included a short video of our painting fun. Be sure to turn the sound up on your computer so you can hear Kyra's comments too. I also apologize for the graininess (sp?) of the video--I took it with our little digital camera, and it isn't the best...

Happy Monday friends!
k~