We threw Max a Lego-themed birthday party back in April, and I'll get around to sharing more details one of these days. For now, though, I wanted to share one of the fun crafty projects we had for the kids. We made plaster of Paris minifigs for them to decorate!
I happened up the minifig mold set on Amazon, and just knew I had to pick it up. I had no plans for what to DO with it, but I simply had to own it. And so I do. After some brainstorming with Jamie, we came up with the idea to use plaster of Paris to make the oversized figures for the kids to decorate.
The set of molds actually came with three different sizes of figures; regular minifig size (not shown) then the middle and big ones shown below.
A naked big minifig with regular LEGO one for scale.
Because we wanted to have one big one per party guest, we were aiming to make 15, and could only do one at a time. I mixed up the plaster 1/4 cup per batch, which filled the big one and the 4 middle ones, with a little left over. They had to sit and cure for about an hour, and then they could be taken out of the mold and set aside to continue drying.
Protip: Be careful when popping the small and medium guys out of the mold; their feet have a tendency to crumble away if you aren't careful! I found popping the feet out first made a big difference in my success rate.
For the party, we supplied the naked minifigs, markers, glitter glue and washable paint for the kids to use.
I had actually hoped to just use markers; they're so much neater than paint, and all that. Below, you'll see the results of the marker tests. The plain white plaster figure, then one on which I colored with markers (just regular Crayola ones) and then the last one we hit with a little spray primer that Jamie had in the garage. While the colors still faded over a couple of weeks, the results are definitely better than the non-primered one.
Overall, I think they were a hit at the party, and I'm pretty sure we'll make them again! I could see doing them up for holidays, to decorate packages, maybe even Christmas tree ornaments!
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