Flower sponge printing

We love flowers in our house – we love to pick them, press them, draw them and paint them BUT we have never printed them. Then, I saw this brilliant idea from Teach Preschool – printing with sponges. I bought a few packs of cheap sponges and Cakey and I got cutting. She made a beautiful flower composition with her sponges. I was almost tempted to stop right there.... but we were both intrigued to see how the printing would work.

And, this is what we did:

• We cut out sponge flowers and shapes and glued them onto cardboard with pva glue. I would recommend a stronger glue if you want the sponge pieces to stick to the cardboard permanently..... this will make sense later.....

• When Cakey was happy with her sponge composition I made her wait for 10 minutes to let the glue dry before we started the printing process. I would have preferred more waiting time but kids don't like waiting!

• We mixed up a watery paint mixture in a tray. Our paint choices were really random - there was some watercolour paint and some acrylic too. We used a few colours in the tray.

• Cakey pressed her sponge composition into the paint tray and then transferred it onto the paper. At first she didn't press hard enough in the tray or on the paper but she soon got the hang of it.

• I helped Cakey to remove the sponge composition from the paper. We repeated this process until the watery paint mixture dissolved the pva glue and the sponge pieces fell off..... which is why you might want to use a stronger glue. On the other hand, my kids were happy to replace printing with soaking the loose sponge pieces in watery paint and squeezing them everywhere.

Check out this post from Red Ted Art for more printing ideas.

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