Spin Art

I can remember going to the Newbury Show when I was 11 and paying an exorbitant (to me at the time!) amount of money to make a spin art picture. If only I'd known how easy it was to do it at home!

What you need:

A salad spinner (make sure there are no holes in the bottom!)

Paper plates (or card)

Paint (poster paints or tempera work well)

An enthusiastic child

It is so easy to do:

1. Cut your paper plates to the right size

2. Secure in the inner spinner compartment with a big lump of blu tac

3. Squirt in some paint in the centre

4. Spiiiiiiiiiiiin (D loves doing this but needs a bit of encouragement to get enough speed up to 'spin out' the paint. He can do it by himself if we used regular kids paints but not when we tried the thicker fabric paints (in our spin art t-shirts)

5. Leave to dry and then admire :)

Raring to go...

Having a sneaky peek to see how it's looking

Ta-da! Finished picture

How pretty are they? You could make lovely cards from them, or gift tags, or even gift wrap if you used less paint and thinner paper (but not too thin or it'll rip when spinning).

Iz is a bit young to join in but D's cousin (21 months) quickly got the hang of it:

D could happily do this activity all afternoon and its a fun way of talking about colours, seeing which ones come out strongest, adding a different colour and responding to change the whole picture etc.

******

We've also recently made "Spin art" t-shirts (thank you Jersey Momma for the idea - see her original post here) - you can read how we did it here :)

******

Have you done any spin art recently? Do you even own a salad spinner?! We had to buy one specially (£5 on Amazon) but it was definitely worth it - it's one of D's most favourite things to do at the moment :)

I'd love to hear any other ways to incorporate spin art into an activity, or any more ideas for using the pictures (as I think we're going to end up with a lot of them!!).