Sea Spuds

Well, I know I've been something of a slacker lately, but it's hard to do new activities when I'm not in my own home. Today we dug around in Grammy's craft stash and pantry to come up with an ocean themed activity to complement last week's post.
I've been wanting to try out potato printing/stamping for a while now, but I've just never gotten around to it. For some reason today seemed like the right day so we gave it a try. I knew I wanted to do something ocean-y, so I googled fish clip art and used this as my inspiration.

I took two small potatoes (I tried to choose ones that would fit reasonably well in Erik's little hands) and cut them in half, then carved my design into the cut end. I found it was easiest to take a pencil and mark the outline of the shape (it didn't actually write, but the tip left an impression), and then take a paring knife and do the actual carving. We ended up with a goldfish, a sea turtle, a whale, and a star fish. I'm pretty pleased with how well they turned out, although the turtle is far from perfect.

Next I squirted a little bit of paint on a couple of paper plates and put one of the potato stamps onto each plate. These were arranged around Erik's paper so that he could easily reach any stamp he wanted.

 Erik caught on right away to what we were doing, but it was only a minute or two before he tried to eat the paint. I put a stop to that really quick and he was ok for another minute or two. Then he discovered that he could stamp on his face...

 ...and in no time at all this devolved into a body painting extravaganza. I was kicking myself for not thinking to take off his clothes first. Oh well....

 Despite the mess, we did get some fun artwork to hang on Grammy's fridge, and (between the painting and the resulting bath) we managed to kill quite a bit of time. I guess that means it was a success.