Strawberry Potato Stamping

For our final strawberry week activity, we decorated the goody bags for Anna’s upcoming birthday party.  I wanted to stamp strawberries on these neon green bags I found in Target’s dollar spot, but I couldn’t find a simple strawberry rubber stamp.  I ran across this post that used potatoes to make stamps, which seemed pretty easy (even if I couldn’t use cookie cutters to make the stamps).  This part needs an adult, a steady hand, and a good sharp paring knife:

Potato stamps, carved and ready to go.

There aren’t any action shots of the stamping, since this needed to be a very hands-on activity for me.  Basically, we dipped the potatoes in a paper plate with some paint on it to “ink” them:

Inked stamps - a little easier to see!

Then we stamped the bags.  (If you try this at home, be sure to put some folded up newspaper in there to keep the paint from soaking through to the other side of the bag!)  It was hard to line up the leaves with the tops of the strawberries, so they’re all a little…unique:

Stamped bag, phase 1.

Finally, a toothpick dipped in yellow paint to add some seeds:

Lots of little yellow dots.
Stamped Bag, Phase 2.

And we now have a pile of inexpensive, homemade, (hopefully) reusable goody bags:

Oh, goody!

Of course, with the paints already out, the girls wanted to paint some more things.  So we added a number of other colors to the paper plate and broke out some paper and paint brushes.

Concentrating hard!
Little Artist

But the temptation of paint…oh, so tempting to squish little fingers in…

Little fingers in the paint...

Luckily, we had nothing else planned, so we could go straight from painting to the bathtub!

Messy little jazz hands.
Slightly bigger (and cleaner) painted jazz hands.

The plate itself is a little work of art, or at least evidence of a thoroughly messy and fun painting session!

Do they make paper plate-shaped frames?

Strawberry Playdough

I found a recipe for making homemade strawberry playdough (scroll down on that page) and decided to try it this morning.  I will never buy commercial playdough again – this smells better, is more malleable, and I know exactly what’s in it.  It would taste awful, but if some ended up in a little mouth it certainly wouldn’t hurt anyone!

So, I had my doubts at this stage:

Playdough in a pan...?

But then after a bit of kneading it looked like this:

Looking a bit more playdough-like!

Add a toothpick for a tool, and here’s a strawberry made out of strawberry playdough:

Strawberry playdough strawberry. Hulled, of course.

The kids have spent the past hour and a half playing with this stuff.  I think we have a winner!

Pokey little toothpick.
Smash!
Squishy!
Master sundae chef.
Shhh. Don't tell her she's working on her motor skills!
A delicious strawberry playdough sundae.