Gelatin Printing: Making Some Legit Posters

So I originally found this idea on Pinterest, but it comes from the blog of Cassie Stephens. Long story short, you make a batch of unflavored gelatin, you put ink on the gelatin, put some leaves on top of the ink, and when you put paper on top of that, you get a cool silhouette poster because the leaves don't let the ink get to some parts of the paper.

Originally I was going to do that exact idea, but then I started thinking that the participants might want to create their own silhouettes. So, I gave them some paper, stencils and scissors, and let them create the shapes we applied to the gelatin.

Cassie suggested a printmaking brayer to spread the ink, but we found we could also spread the ink using a ruler. You can obviously buy printing ink at a craft store, but we had library stamp replacement ink available, and that seemed to work.

P.S. When you are planning your shapes, be aware of their orientation. It'll wind up as an inverted image when it is applied to the paper, as our LIZARD poster attests to. The top image is what the poster looked like, and the bottom image is the shape we applied to the gelatin.

Super Bowl Fun and Games

It might be a little late for Super Bowl party ideas (or ridiculously early lol), but these activities were a lot of fun, and might work for some other things too.

I "Heart" books

You know those fans that write messages like, "Kaepernick is the best" or "I 'heart' Flacco?" Well I thought it would be cool if we did the same thing with books =D

Paper Football

Some of my friends will be really bored at a restaurant or something, and inevitably, out comes the paper football. Did you know that there is actually a fun (albeit simple) game that goes along with it?

Target Practice

What's better than throwing a bunch of plastic balls at oatmeal containers, paper towel rolls, and cups? Not much apparently hehe. This was one of our favorite activities actually.

Food

I figured that a Super Bowl party wouldn't be complete without the food, so we bought some chips and some pop, and all together, we had a great time!

Glogster: Create Interactive Posters

Once again, my SPLAT homies have put me onto a cool site for all of you =D They mentioned this site a couple months ago, but I forgot the name of it. Then, they mentioned it again this last time we had our quarterly meeting, so I figure I'll do a post on it so I don't forget again hehe.

The site is Glogster, and its another one of those social media like thingys. This network focuses on creating interactive posters called Glogs (Graphic Blogs), combining pictures, text, videos, and graphics into your own creation.

Like most of the social media entities, this does require creating a free account. Glogster seems to promote its connectivity to video and photo sites (like Youtube and Flickr), and then the sharing feature for all your other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and the like).

For educators, there is also a Glogster EDU that has recently been launched to offer private classroom management of multiple Glogster accounts. Just so you know, these ones cost money.

So if you make a lot of posters, I thought that this might be a cool alternative to the traditional stuff.