Valentine’s Marbleizing with shaving cream and food colouring!

Oh yeah, we did it again! We were doing some Valentine’s crafting today using one of my favourite painting techniques: marbleizing with shaving cream and food colouring.

We did this last year at Valentine’s using slightly different colours (you can see the post here), and as much as the results were gorgeous, the photos that I took back then, just didn’t do the project justice, so here’s a new post with the photos that I took today.

These pictures still don’t completely capture the beauty of this technique, but hopefully they’re impressive enough that you’ll try this at home with your little ones. You really have to do it to truly appreciate it. Best thing is, it’s totally easy to set up and do, and the clean up is easy as well, as everything just rinses clean under the tap.

What you’ll need:

Shaving cream
food colouring (liquids or icing gels)
eye droppers or pipettes (optional)
stir sticks
plastic gift card or a piece of cardboard (for scraping)
something to make your print on: white paper or cardstock, white cardboard, doilies etc.

This isn’t a terribly messy activity, but because there’s food colouring involved, which can stain, you should protect your work surface. We always use an inexpensive vinyl tablecloth for messy crafting.

You’ll also want to protect your child’s clothing with an apron or a smock. You may have noticed the aprons that the hooligans wear when we’re getting messy. I make them from the legs of our old jeans.

You can get the tutorial for my repurposed denim aprons here.

How to marbleize with shaving cream and food colouring:

Have your little one squirt a generous amount of shaving cream onto a baking sheet. As much as it may be tempting to do this step yourself, let your child give it a try. It’s great for muscle control and co-ordination.

With an expired gift card or credit card or even a sturdy piece of cardboard, smooth the shaving cream over the surface of the pan.Let your child have a go at this step as well. It’s very satisfying to smoosh and spread the shaving cream around, and you can always go over it one last time yourself to smooth it out.

Now things get really fun!

If you’re using liquid food colouring, simply dribble your colours all over the surface of the shaving cream.

We used Wilton icing gels today. You can order yours right here from my site!

I mixed 4 colours (pink, purple, red and turquoise) ahead of time with a bit of water. I added a generous dab of gel to 2 or 3 tbsp of water so our colours would be really intense, like this:

I gave the hooligans some droppers to transfer the colours to the baking sheet. This was also a great test in fine motor control, as they had to squeeze the dropper in order to fill the dropper, and to release the drops of colour onto the shaving cream. This took them quite some time, and I let them work away at it, until the baking sheet was well covered.

Next, grab a stir stick (a craft stick, a skewer or even a plastic knife), and let the magic begin! This next step is a fascinating lesson in creating designs and colour blending.

Stir and swirl the drops of colour together, and watch the transformation…Now, take your white paper or cardboard or whatever it is you’re making your print on, and gently press it into the marbled shaving cream. Don’t press it in deep because you don’t want to disturb the pattern of colours that you’ve just created.

Lift your paper off, and let it sit for a half a minute or so, and then with your credit card, gently scrape the shaving cream off to reveal THIS:

Isn’t this just the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?

So simple, but it never fails to completely WOW me!

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The process:

We divided our pasta in to 5 piles, and the Hooligans picked out the colours that they wanted: purple, green, blue, pink and orange.

For each colour, we mixed a generous blob of colouring with about a tsp of vinegar. Ok, see the picture below? See what we mixed our vinegar/colouring in? I have to confess that I swipe a few of those little ketchup cups every time I’m at McDonald’s. They’re handy when it comes to stuff like this. Anyway, mix your vinegar and food colouring until the gel has dissolved, and make sure you’ve used enough colouring. You want it to be DARK. Our first batch of purple pasta turned out way too light, and we had to dye it a second time. No biggie, just sayin’.

Pour your vinegar/colour over your pasta. Pop the lid on your container, and shake the heck out of it.

Dump your pasta out onto a plate or something (we used sytrofoam meat trays) and let it dry. I placed ours in front of the fire, and they were completely dry in about a half an hour.

Now, you have this brilliantly coloured pasta for crafting with! You could make art with it, or use it for a sorting activity, but we made necklaces with ours. While I was getting the “needles” and wool ready, the Hooligans were busy exploring the pasta, and within seconds, had their fingers adorned with it.

For the necklaces, I tied a foam letter to the end of the wool so the pasta wouldn’t slide right off, and we used our homemade sewing needles again.

Remember these?

Take a straw (I’m using some rubbermaid straws which will last forever), and make a slit in one end. Thread your yarn through the straw, secure one end in the slit, and you’re good to go! Making necklaces is a super exercise in fine motor control. It quite challenged our youngest crafters. Just look at the concentration.