Rolling Pin Printing

One of my RSS feeds turned up a cool tutorial on print making with a rolling pin from Craft Chi. I thought it was a really great idea, so that evening went and got a couple of old rolling pins from the local Goodwill. The next day me and the kids stuck a load of those little foam shape stickers all over the rolling pins. We got the self adhesive flower ones from the Dollar Tree and the self adhesive little people from the dollar section in Target.

Next we mixed up some kiddy paint that was watered down a little with a tiny bit of liquid dish soap added. Poured the paint on a sheet of aluminium foil and rolled the pins in it until they were coated evenly in paint.

Then the girls took turns rolling the pins over some brown paper and some butchers block paper we had handy. I was surprised at how easily they were able to manage it by themselves being only two and three years old, and they were fascinated by the patterns coming out.

When the little people papers were dry we decorated the people by adding hair and faces and clothes to them. We cut out our favourite ones and glued them to lollypop sticks to make cute little puppets.

I'd love to do this with slightly older kids and mix up a load of different skin tones, print pages of people of all races and then decorate them in the national costumes from various countries. Here are a few I did for the kids to play with while they were busy making thiers.

Phew, this is a long post isn't it! Here are a few of the flower prints too. I think we are going to use them for wrapping paper.