Potato Printing

My husband gets a lot of large packages couriered to our house in his line of work, and as he was cleaning up the packaging and the miles and miles of brown packing paper, I was reminded of an activity that my mom used to do with us a lot when we were little - printing!  My little guy's hands are too small for apples yet, but we had some perfectly sized potatoes in the cupboard - so today, we took out the 'fall' paint - red, yellow, orange, and brown - and unfolded some of daddy's recycling, and carved up some potatoes for printing (stamping)! 

This is a great activity, because you really don't need anything special - just potatoes, paper, paint, and a knife!  (As always, please be careful to do the cutting with the knife for your children, and to keep it out of their reach when you're finished!)  Hendrik is starting to learn his shapes, and his favourites are triangle and stars - so we cut a potato in half, and out of one half we fashioned a triangle, and out of the other, a star! 

To do this, cut into the potato in half.  On the flat side, make your cuts until you see your desired shape in the lines that you've cut - for a triangle, then, I just made three cuts - about 1.5cm deep.  

Turn the potato on it's side, and cut along the side at the same depth as your cuts above - you're carving away the unwanted potato right now.

Carefully remove the unwanted potato to reveal your printing shape!

We kept one half of a potato uncarved and just printed with that for a bit to make some circles, and then we made it into a tree! 

Hendrik, at 20 months, is just starting to explore things like painting, and is a little wary yet about diving in and getting all messy - so today we just talked about the shapes and colours and mommy did most of the printing while he said, "More?  More tree?  More star?  More Triangle?"  However, for kids a bit older, this would be a great way to make home-made wrapping paper for Christmas!  Or Christmas cards!  Or Birthday cards!  Also, I don't have any cookie cutters small enough, but I did think that it would be cool to press a fun cookie cutter into a potato and then cut away the potato around the cookie cutter - you could get a lot of fun shapes that way!  I think I may just have to do another post on this in a few weeks with some of these ideas!