4-H: Crackle Paint Project

For our December meetings we finished the leathercraft project by making book marks and our final meeting of 2012 was our Christmas Party and the kids enjoyed themselves by playing some silly games.

For our first meeting in January I thought the children would enjoy crackle painting the edges of a picture frame.  Once dry they would insert a nice piece of scrapbook paper for the background.  These then can be used as "white boards" or memo boards as you can write on the glass with a dry erase marker.

An easy and inexpensive way to crackle the paint is to brush on Elmer's Wood Glue and allow to get tacky and then paint over with the color of your choice.  Easy enough, except we were dealing with extremely dry conditions here in the dead of winter in North Dakota and the glue dried before the children were able to get the paint on the frame.  Because of this most of the frames did not crackle, but the kids still had fun getting a bit messy and I really don't think any cared if their paint crackled or not.  I never heard one word of complaint, so they were either happy with the results or just extremely polite!

To keep the cost down I bought a few of the frames from garage sales over the summer at a quarter a piece and the rest from the dollar store.  I also picked up the paint free at our hazardous waste. The biggest expense was the glue.

In the end the project was fairly inexpensive and the kids really did enjoy themselves.  I have heard back from some parents that their children plan to do this again at home, so I must admit the project was a success.