Sometimes you have to get innovative with what you have around the house to entertain your kids.  Last night was one of those nights for me.  My daughter really wanted to paint but wanted to do something “weird”, as she said.  What she meant was that she wanted to use something besides a brush to paint, like we did with the foam sponge cleaning brush back at Christmas.  (Hmm… now that I am looking at that post again, I think we might try doing fall trees next week.)

Anyway, I walked around the house, holding my colicky 2-month-old, looking for something unique for the elder daughter to use.  Something that would provide a different texture or design.  Then I found just the thing inside my airline travel kit — a plastic comb.  I’ve heard of using combs to flick paint onto a canvas, but I certainly didn’t want that mess to deal with so I suggested she use it more like a scraper. 

One tip on selecting which comb you use: make sure all the teeth are the same length.  On some combs, the end teeth are a bit longer, and that won’t work so well being dragged through the paint.  If your comb is like that, just use scissors to snip off the longer teeth.

First, we picked out some paint colors. Then, I found some paper (we happened to use the white 12×12 paper that comes inside the plastic scrapbook page protectors) and we put the paper on my new favorite thing, an oven liner. I just discovered oven liners the other day and decided they would be great for our upcoming chili party (stay tuned to see how we use them) and they would also work for controlling crafting messes.  With all of our supplies at hand, we squirted the paint out onto the paper.

Then I told her to run the comb through the paint to see what happened. I had no idea if this would work or not. Luckily for me, it did. She loved using the comb to make the line effects in the paint and she loved seeing how the separate lines of color combined.  We were on a roll!  Of course, we had to try more colors:

She ended up painting about 8 of these with different colors. She had a blast and wants to do it again later this week when her friend comes to visit. I chalk that up to a Mommy success this evening! Now off to rest before tackling the next thing!