Kids craft project
Piggybacking from my other blog post, if you haven’t read about the salt painting name plate activity, you can click here. This time I wanted to a do name plate that was sort of vintage looking. Once again it involves glue and tracing.
I went to Ikea and bought 2 Ribba square shadow box frames. I love this frames, so versatile. That have a very sturdy back which is perfect for this art project. Open up the frames take out the brown back and have your kids write their names. Make sure they write on the opposite side of the hanger. They can make mistakes, start over and try it as much as they want.
When they’re happy with their names, get out the glue and have them trace over their names. Wait for the glue to completely dry, you’ll know it’s dry when it’s hard and translucent.
Then take some aluminum foil and attach it the board so it covers the dried glue.
Gently rub your fingers over all the hard glue surfaces and you’ll start to see their name form around the foil. Be careful not to press too hard or you’ll make a hole in the foil. After you’ve imprinted your design, get some black shoe polish, and gently swirl around and over the name, being sure to keep it on the foil. It’ll have some neat swirl patterns that only adds to the character of these name plates.
If you’d like to add small intricate details, you can take a blunt pencil and carefully add some lines or dots on top of the foil.
Let the shoe polish dry and then place back in the frames.
Jacob on top, Nicholas on the bottom- I love how his little 'N' is backwards and he wrote his name going from bottom to top, in true 4 yr old fashion.
I love this kids art activity for several reasons:
My kids want to put their name on everything
It’s gives them a chance to be super creative with it
It’s a nice multi-layered approach and the end result looks nothing like how it begins. And if you know anything about what I do as a photographer you can understand why I like it!
It looks so freakin’ cool when it’s done! I bought two more of the RIbba frames and have hand molds from each kid, hanging next to each of their names in my stairway.
Now I want to see what else I can create with this!