Things to Make - Potato Stamp Prints

A friend bought the girls Todd Oldham's book, Kid Made Modern, and F can't stop looking through the projects. So, a few weeks ago, we tried potato stamp printing. F really wanted to make a pattern, just like in the book. But after each of her attempts smeared, she became somewhat frustrated with the stamps and started finger and hand-painting instead, which lead to a whole new project (more on that tomorrow). On the upside, I really liked the whole stamping process and could see making my own crafts this way (Christine Schmidt's Print Workshop: Hand-Printing Techniques and Truly Original Projects has inspired me). I also think that as the kids age we'll come back to this technique again and again, especially for making patterns. Here's the scoop:

1. Carve a "stamp" out of an ordinary potato. I used an ordinary kitchen knife and found it tricky at best. (Perhaps an exacto knife would work better?) Thus, I stuck with basic shapes - a square and triangle.

2. We squeezed some Crayola Washable Kid's Paint Sets set of 10 into a shallow dish and then blotted it down with a paper towel to try and make it more even. Felt would have worked much better, but I didn't have any. Or we could have used Foam Brayer 4in to even it out (again, I didn't have one as this project was somewhat spontaneous).

3. Stamp away.

HAVE A GREAT MONDAY EVERYONE! AND CHECK IN TOMORROW TO SEE HOW THIS PROJECT EVOLVED . . .