Kids Get Crafty: (London) City Postcards - Red Ted Art

Hello! Today we made our own potato print city postcards! We had lots of fun making them (well maybe I did more than Red Ted… mmh…) and found a lovely book to go with them. Potato printing is a fabulous craft for kids – it is easy and quick to do at home – and usually you have all the materials to hand. Kids can practice motor skills whilst exploring colours. Use cookie cutters to help you “cut out” nice shapes.

They were inspired by a number of things:

Zoe from Playing By The Book’s great postcard swap
The fact we live in London and I wanted our postcards to reflect this (though they look more New York, than London..)
Our Ink Stamp Card Guest Post from a few weeks back
AND a lovely book

(this would go nicely with this mountain craft for kids!)

Firstly the Book

Follow The Line, Laura Ljungklist

This is a lovely book that will appeal to all “design geeks”… it is wonderfully illustrated and just that little bit different. It starts off in the morning – following a line around the city, through traffic, the ocean, country side etc until it is time for bed. The line becomes skyscrapers, cars, boats etc. It feels quite interactive, as you can “follow the line” with your finger and as you go through the pages you get to count different things (like fire hydrants or cars with lights on). So lots to look at and explore. We love it.x

The Craft

We decided to make a city scape out of potato prints to represent London – of course Big Ben, the London Eye, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Gherkin would have been better icons, but I am not that skilled in potato cutting!!!! So skyscrapers it was. Red Ted love the book – the only downside was, he kept asking for “extra details” the book had (e.g. a clock) and our potatoes didn’t have these – if we had more time, I could have cut extra parts, I am sure.. and we could have used our potato blocks as “building blocks” and created all sorts of wonders. But we only have postcards to make… so…

It took him a while to get the hang of “not wiggling” the potato. So we did a “free for all” painting first, with sky and sun and prints (he LOVED this bit: Note to self: Red Ted is getting older and needs to explore more by himself… less mummy meddling). Then we did the postcards.

Interestingly Red Ted is now really into colour theory and mixing colours (esp pink!)

I confess, I did a lot of helping – sorry. But we *needed them* for the great swap. And we did do the “free painting”… uhm, so I feel ok about it. Really, I do.