Spider Week, Day 3: Handprint Spider

This was probably my most ambitious activity with Laurie to date. There's not much that can go wrong with throwing his toys into a laundry basket with string over it. And food is food, my son isn't going to turn his nose up at that!

Planning out a craft activity is a little more challenging. And what made it even more difficult was that we didn't attempt it until the evening, more specifically, after 4pm which is customarily Laurie's time for getting a wee bit cranky and not knowing what to do with himself. He doesn't want to nap, he's not long had a feed, it's too early for tea, he wants to be active and doing things but he doesn't always know what. Invariably this is the time which is spent walking him up and down the living room to study and talk to the vacuum cleaner.

In its simplest form, this is two black handprints, overlapping on the palm, with two googly eyes to make a spider image.

Isn't it the cutest spider you've ever seen?

That's my son's masterpiece.

There are no photos of the actual process we underwent to make this cutie, because it was a rather involved exercise. I'd originally planned for it to be a morning activity but I'm glad I had Mr Click on hand to help.

What you need:
Black poster paint
Paper
Googly eyes (as many as your spider will need)
PVA glue

Preparation:
Pour some poster paint into a small dish/tray large enough to get your small person's hand flat into. This was a bit of a mistake as we didn't get the right sort of container of poster paint so had to dab it onto his hand with a paint sponge. This was messy.

If your small person is likely to tear up the paper, tape it down.

What to do:
Place your small person's hand into the black paint (don't worry about getting paint on the thumb, ideally you'll just be getting paint on the palm and fingers), immediately afterwards, stamp it on the paper.

Rotate the paper 180 degrees, apply extra paint if needed, and stamp again so that the palm overlaps the original impression.

Voila! It's a spider.

Pick out some googly eyes and stick them on. Laurie chose one large and one medium. I suggested that he might like to pick a third, but he declined.

In the future I'm going to try getting the paint into some sort of dish to make the actual handprinting a little easier. My original go, with some pale green paper, was with Laurie sitting in the highchair but I couldn't get his hand at a good angle to stamp it on the paper (and the paper had to be taped down so he couldn't eat it, so not so good for quickly turning it).

The version that is now hanging on my kitchen door was taped to the changing mat (which made it easy to spin, just turn the whole mat). I took a bit of a risk by not putting anything down on the living room carpet to catch potential paint mishaps. I got lucky but in future I'll be using extra protection!

Laurie seemed quite interested in the finished product, though I think when I was painting his hand he was mostly just baffled. At this age, this is definitely more of a project for me than for him but as he gets older I think he'll enjoy the feel of the paint and will have fun decorating his creation.

I'll maybe give it another go later in the month to make a monster face, though if I'm alone, we'll maybe be doing that one sitting in the bath!