In honor of one of our favorite children's museum features, and an old, but still awesome post by Filth Wizardry, we decided to kick off the summer fun this year, by building our very own shadow room - scaled down just a bit.
We cut one side off of a Pop-Tart box (yes Mom, I'm still feeding the children a steady diet of sugar and food coloring), and painted the back "wall" with a few coats of glow-in-the-dark paint.
After a quick test run in a dark room with a ultraviolet flashlight...
...to make sure it worked (the idea with a shadow room is to strike a pose in front of a special wall, waiting for the flash of light, set on a timer, before stepping away to see your shadow left behind)...
...we covered the rest of the interior walls, and the outside of the box with black construction paper, and a few silver stars - to make it snazzy.
And just like that the costumers were lining up.
We used a Streamlight TwinTask 3C flashlight, "borrowed" from the Man of the House, for our shadow room, but there are a number of less expensive ultraviolet flashlights out there, that I can only assume would work just as well.
If you want a nice dark, and semi-long lasting shadow, you need to place your shadow box in a very dark room. We have a Harry Potterish play area under our stairs that worked well for us, but any windowless room with the lights off will do.
Once all the tiny toys in the house have had a go at leaving shadows on the wall, your children will ask for full-size version. Before you give into the excitement of the moment, and paint an entire wall of your house, come back tomorrow for a kid-sized, but still-keeping-it-simple option.
4 comments:
My kids would LOVE to do this! It'd be a HUGE hit.
LOTS of fun. Clever!
You continue to stupefy me with your creativity!
Very interesting! I think I should use this as an excuse to get a UV flashlight :)
Post a Comment