Foam marbling

This is one of my most favourite activities to date - I love it!! And have even done a few pictures of my own after D is in bed ;)

Seriously, how pretty is that?!

So what do you need?

- shaving foam

- food colouring or liquid watercolours

- something to "swish" with (eg craft stick, spoon, finger)

- watercolour paper

- ruler or Squeezee 

How to do it:

Squeeze some foam out onto a flat surface (we did it inside one of our sensory bins) and roughly flatten it off. Add a few drops of different colours (D loves doing this bit)

 

Use your "swisher" to swirl the colours into the foam

Proudly show off your pattern

Even the scrapey-stick looks pretty!

Gently press your paper on top of the foam. Make sure all areas come into contact with the foam

 

Leave for one minute and then carefully lift the paper up (it will be covered in foam - don't worry!)

Using a ruler/Squeezee, expel all the foam off to one side - we used craft sticks but they were too small really. But you can see the cool pattern being exposed as we removed the foam above :) 

Admire your amazing masterpiece

Aren't they just so pretty?

Even just looking at foam is lovely...

Tips

Make sure the ruler (or whatever you're using to remove the foam) is larger than the piece of foamy paper. If you have to make 2 passes (or more) to clear the foam you will get extra streaky marks on your paper that aren't quite as pretty...

We personally found the colours obtained with the food colouring were much more vibrant than with the watercolours. It might be because the watercolours were more dilute (I'd make them more concentrated next time) but is something to bear in mind.

You can see the difference here - watercolour ones top left and food colouring ones bottom right

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Afterwards we used the rainbow foam for small world play with some of D's animals - he gave them all a rainbow bath and then washed them all afterwards. It lent an extra 20 minutes of playtime to the pretty foam and was nice to use it for a couple of different things :)

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These pictures would make lovely homemade cards or present tags - perfect for that next present for the grandparents.

Have you done marbling with shaving foam? I'd love to hear about it :)