Finger paint fun

Today Pipidinko had his girlfriend Kate over for a play date. I cooked up some finger paint for them and let them have fun.

Finger paint is rather easy to make. It's basically water and food coloring, with flour added for thickness. Here's how I made it:

• 2 cups of white flour, poured slowly in a pot with 4 cups of water, stirring constantly, to avoid clumps.
• Warmed up the mixture, constantly stirring on a medium heat, and cooked it for about 7 minutes. Not quite 10 minutes, but it was enough for it to thicken.
• I also added a little bit of salt and a few drops of vanilla, as warmed up flour smelled rather unpleasantly.
• Spooned the mixture into the muffin tin and let it cool off in the fridge for a few minutes.
• I had 4 basic colors of food coloring. Just use a few drops to achieve pretty good color paint. Mix up the colors to make as many colors as you wish.

I showed what to do with the paint to the kids, but they had their own ideas. Kate just wanted to cover her whole self with this paint and ignored the paper. She covered her face, tummy and legs with all available colors. Unfortunately, I didn't catch this moment on camera. It was very cute.

Santino enjoyed all the colors, he liked to paint with his fingers. This was his first time painting with the fingers, and he loved it. He already tried paint brush, pencils, pens and markers before. Now he actually had a chance to mix the colors and achieve new ones. Before i would only give him 1 or 2 colors at a time.

A little tip to moms, who will want to attempt this at their home, don't forget to clean up right away as long as the paint is wet. If you let it dry, it will become very stiff and will stick to the surface its on.

After washing up, kids played in the warm kiddie pool. They had lots of fun, had some snacks and finished the play with a kiss.

Nataliya

Originally published here