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Creative Stamp Making with Food

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Stamps are great for crafts or decorating stationary before you send a letter. Here is a way that children can make their own stamps to decorate clothing, make a picture, or to make homemade wrapping paper to wrap a present in.

The best food to use when making your own stamps are apples and potatoes. Apples make a great design on their own cut in half vertically (for a traditional apple shape) or horizontally (for a circle with a star-shape in the middle).

With a potato, cut it in half and then make your design. Depending on the age of the children you may or may not want to let them execute this part. An easy way to make a design on the potato to use as a stamp is with small cookie cutters. Press the cookie cutter into the potato and the remove the excess flesh. You can make a positive or negative impression by removing the inside of the area or the outside of the area where the cookie cutter made its mark.

With tempura or another toxic-free paint, dip the apple or potato into the paint and have an extra piece of paper handy to dab off the extra paint. Make many different designs with the potatoes to great a variety of designs.

If you want to use the stamps as print making on clothing, buy some fabric paint at the craft store. If the paint is too thick add a few drops of water at a time until it is at a consistency that is easier to work with.

Be creative with your choices, you may also want to try carrots or another hard vegetable to see what kind of mark they leave. An alternative and less messy way to get the paint on the vegetable is to paint it on with a brush instead of dipping it into the paint.

Summer Memory Jars

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Instead of keeping a journal or starting a scrap book a child may be interested in making their own memory jar from the summer. If all the memories will not fit into one jar, they may want to make several for special days or outings that happened during the summer break.

What you will need is a large clear glass jar with a lid. This can be used from an empty pickle jar or other food container that is empty and has been cleaned out. If you are having trouble getting the entire label off, you can use nail polish remover to dissolve the glue and paper that is still stuck.

Have the child collect small mementos or other meaningful objects that will fit inside a jar. They can be photographs, a special rock found, something they made, a friendship bracelet, the options are really only limited to their imagination. A good example for a day trip memory jar is one from the beach. Fill the bottom part of the jar with sand or pebbles that were collected from the beach, add in some shells and other interesting finds.

Take a picture of your child at the beach and they can use it as a backdrop for the items.

As time goes on the children may want to open their jars and rearrange them and as long as they are careful with the glass that is fine. Put up a shelf in their room and they can have a collection of memory jars. Put a label on the top of the jar with the date or date range and the location of where the items were collected. These can be kept for years as a lasting reminder of the fun they had growing up and going to special places with mom and dad.

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