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You are here: Home / Process Art / How to Make Sun Catchers with PVA Glue and Food Colouring

How to Make Sun Catchers with PVA Glue and Food Colouring

Written by Josie

Since we bought a bumper pack of food colouring from Amazon, I’ve been surprised how many things we’ve used it for that are totally unrelated to baking! These sun catchers are made by painting on wet glue with food colouring. You could make these pretty marbled sun catchers with liquid water colours too however food colouring is much cheaper. This is a process art activity where less is more which can sometimes be hard for younger children to appreciate. It would work well with kids from about 4, with a bit of guidance.

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Equipment to Make Sun Catchers

  • PVA Glue – You need quite a lot for this so you might want to top up your supply*
  • Food Colouring – We use this great set*, you could also use liquid water colours
  • Cocktail Sticks – These are used to marble the paint, skewers or any other pointy stick could work in their place
  • Lids – I was planning this activity for a while so saved some lids from things like humus and yoghurt pots but also used some lids for round Tupperware type containers which survived the process fine
Equipment for making sun catchers
Equipment for making sun catchers

Preparing to Create your Sun Catchers

You’ll need to squeeze a good amount of glue into each of the lids. You need enough to generously cover the bottom. If they are too thin you wont be able to get them out of the lids. If they are too think they’ll take a ages to dry and waste your glue. If in doubt, add a bit more. Remember to to let it spread into any lips on the lids before deciding if you have enough.

Putting glue into the lids
Putting glue into the lids

Adding the Food Colouring and Marbling

We found lighter, brighter colours worked best for this. If you want to use darker ones, use them sparingly. You just need a few drops of each colour, otherwise they all blend together too much.

Adding food colouring to the wet glue
Adding food colouring to the wet glue

Once you’ve added your colour drops, use the cocktail sticks to swirl the colours around the glue. This will leave you with a marbled effect shown in the 1st and 3rd picture below.

How the food colouring changes as the sun catchers dry
How the colours change as the sun catchers dry

As the glue dries, the food colouring will bleed and sort of melt in to the glue so the finished effect will be quite different (seen in the 2nd and 4th photos above). If you have added too much colour, or too many dark colours, your colours won’t have any definition.

Finishing and displaying the Sun Catchers

It will take quite a while for the glue to dry, ours took between 36 and 72 hours to be completely dry. It will depend how thick they are and what the weather is like. Once they are dry, you can use a small knife to lift one edge and then peel the sun catcher out of the lid.

We decided to trim ours to remove the ridge around the edge created by the lip of the lids. You could also cut them in to shapes, like hearts or stars.

For display, we simply used a little more PVA glue to stick them to our windows. It dries clear and peels off easily when you want to take them down. If you don’t want to do that you just pop a small hole in each one and add string to hang them from.

The finished sun catchers
The finished sun catchers – I couldn’t get a good picture of them on the window but this is how they look on a white background.

Overall, we had mixed results with this because some of the sun catchers had a bit too much food colouring but with the benefit of hindsight we’d be able to create even better ones next time. If you’re looking for some other uses for food colouring, check out how we got on with shaving foam marbling and bubble painting.

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Making sun catchers by painting on wet glue

Filed Under: Process Art

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A blog about trying to raise independent kids while retaining a sense of humour. Me: I’m Josie, a 43 year old introvert and former librarian. Them: My husband Chris, Boy Child who is 11 and Girl Child who is 9. The others: Hera the cat and Baxter the dog. Read More…

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