Cardboard Tube Printing

We have been going through the recycling bag a lot lately to pull out anything that could be useful in crafts, messy play or imaginative play. I have started to collect them in a lovely big basket on top of the fridge, just ready waiting for us to get creative!

The other day I cut up some cardboard tubes and placed them in a shallow, plastic paint tray with a few squirts of poster paint. I found a few bottle tops and larger jar lids too and added them to the mix.

Cakie had lots of fun printing directly onto sheets of card, using the different sized lids and tubes. The tubes are a particularly good starting point for printing as they are easy to hold and don’t slip over the paper like so many commercial printer pads or like when using vegetables and fruit. Those also offer fun learning experiences (and we use them a lot too), but you don’t tend to see such good results. More like a big, smeary, colourful mess! They work better with a bit more hand control.

We talked as she played and used lots of vocabulary relating to circles, bigger, smaller, overlapping, inside, outside etc.

She then naturally extended the play to become about making a tower from the tubes and experimenting with how many she could stack before they collapsed. 3 (and 1 cookie cutter) apparently!

Next she had a really good go at fitting all of the tubes inside each other and worked out that in order to get the last one in she would have to squish it up first. She was pretty pleased with herself!

Printing always makes visually pleasing results so I shall be thinking of something to do with these finished pictures. Maybe making them into the background pages for a book we will write, the decoration for a play-scence or just frame and hang them!