Valentine's Spin Art

With Valentine's Day coming up next weekend, it's time for Monkey and I to make some art to send to family and friends.

When I saw this salad spinner painting activity, I was sold! How fun!! I got the instructions here: http://www.toddlerapproved.com/2016/01/spin-art-heart-suncatchers.html?m=1

Supplies: pink, red, and white paints, construction paper, spoons or droppers, coffee filters, paint tray, heart stencil, salad spinner 

I have some heart cookie cutters from the grocery store, but you could also use cardboard tracers. I used our normal salad spinner because I'm not really worried about the paint, I find it easy to clean. I've heard you can get a relatively cheap spinner at IKEA if you're concerned about using it for food after having paint in it. 

The coffee filters I have happened to fit perfectly inside the salad spinner. Monkey helped me squeeze some paint into our paint tray and he was ready to go. 

He used spoons to scoop up some paint and drop it into the coffee filter inside the spinner. 

Then we spun! Monkey is strong enough to do it by himself slowly, so he asked for my help to make it spin really fast. 

Well, this turned out to be a bit of a fail. 

The paint was so thick that it barely moved at all when we spun. We had to make it way thinner. So I put the paint into some little plastic tubs and added water to each one (a ratio of about 75% paint, 25% water). Monkey helped mix the water into the paint. 

Now that we had thinned out the paint, we gave it another try. I also taped the coffee filter to the salad spinner as I had noticed that it moved around on our first attempt. 

Success!!

Watering down the paints made all the difference. I put this coffee filter aside to dry and put a new one in for Monkey. 

Monkey dropped more paint in and spun. 

We ended up making a total of nine before Monkey declared that he was all done. 

Later in the evening, once the paint had dried, I grabbed the heart cookie cutters and the construction paper and cut out some hearts and made frames. 

Then I glued them all together. 

I think they turned out so great! If you hang them in the window the light comes through the coffee filter. We're sending these out to some loved ones to brighten up their windows, too. 

Mar