I Spy Bottle & Salt Painting

I took my family up to Travis AFB today.  It is quite the drive so I decided to make my daughter an I Spy bottle to hopefully help keep her occupied.  I used a cleaned up Nesquik bottle (have I mentioned how I love these bottles?  They’re great for projects.), rice and whatever knick knacks I found in the playroom.

Unfortunately this one didn’t go off as planned.  It kept her occupied for about 10 minutes looking for stuff and then another 5 using it as a maracas and then she was done with it.  Ah well.  That’s when the DVD player in the car comes in handy.

Later that night she begged to do another experiment.  I’ve been running out of ideas so went on a craft hunt on Pinterest last night.  I came across salt painting and it sounded simple enough and didn’t require anything we didn’t already have.  She made her design using Elmer’s glue and then poured salt over the glue.

Then take some water color paint and gently touch the brush to the salt.  The color will spread across the salt all by itself.  The original post I found used liquid paint and it seemed to work much better.  Kaitlyn had to use a lot of water and make sure her brush was pretty saturated to get a good spread.

Then as anything involving paint usually does it devolved into painting her fingers and doing finger painting.  Here’s her finished product.

It was fun but probably not a project we will do again.  Maybe will try it again when she’s older.