Today we tried another new messy craft activity, shaving foam marbling except I had accidentally bought gel instead of foam. We soldiered on regardless and will put this one down to a practice run and a whole heap of fun.

William loved it and it is the longest he has stuck at any art activity to date and so it is definitely something that we will be trying again.

With the proper materials!

For our first attempt we got out our now all too familiar roasting tins and squirted them full with gel. It was at this point that I realised my shopping error. Instead of lots of lovely white foam there was shiny icy blue gel.

Esther and William of course did not realise and they thought that whipping the gel up into a white lathery foam was all part of the fun.

Once the gel was turned white we added some food colouring. Esther and William are very good at recognising colours and loved choosing the colours that they wanted to add to their gel.

Then came the mixing!

I think that Esther must be more heavy handed than William had her colours really blended together to make one solid new colour while William’s colours stayed separate in lovely swirls and twirls of colour.

I do love observing how differently they do things and seeing the different end results they produce. Having boy / girl twins is really rather fascinating.

Once Esther and William had created their colourful foam it was time to do the marbling. I lay a piece of A4 drawing paper in the roasting tin and gently pressed down on it. Esther and William helped. We then lifted the paper out and looked at the patterns we had made.

On one piece I scraped the excess paint / foam off with a sponge and that left a lovely smooth coloured sheet of paper that would make a lovely background for a drawing or collage.

Once the marbling was complete Esther and William were keen to get really messy. They played with their foamy paint with their hands and with their plastic animals.

We know how to make a real mess when we play in this house because we know that just as much fun as making the mess is getting everything clean!

We had great fun trying out shaving gel marbling and adapting the method to make our own messy play.

I have now ordered some proper shaving foam and when it arrives we are going to be trying out these two shaving foam marbling activities in time for Valentines Day.

http://www.theimaginationtree.com/2011/01/shaving-foam-marbling.html
http://www.firstpalette.com/Craft_themes/Colors/shavingfoammarbling/shavingfoammarbling.html

Have you tried shaving foam marbling? Why not have a go today? And leave a link below as I would love to see what else can be done with this sensory material.

You can see my growing collection of ideas over on Pinterest.