Craft Lab: Pasta Maker Printing

Re-purpose kitchen tools for making art!

Today's project: Pasta Maker Prints
Supplies:
pasta maker (just the flat rollers--the cutting roller can be missing)
craft foam (sticky back kind works easiest)
scissors
brayers
printing ink
cards or cardstock to print on

I happened to own two pasta makers but on one, the cutters never worked very well, so I donated that one to the library for projects just like this one. Valentine's Day (the day after I hosted this event) is a perfect excuse to make some cute cards, so that's what we did!  I got the inspiration for this project from the Eric Carle Museum.

Here's what we did:

1.  Cut out the shapes you want to print from stick-backed craft foam (remember to cut letters and numbers in reverse!).  Mount the shapes onto a piece of cardstock in the design arrangement you want to print.  Remember--this piece of cardstock will need to fit through the pasta rollers, so make sure it's not too wide!

 2. Apply a thin layer of printing ink to the surface of your craft foam shapes with an ink brayer.

 3. Place the card that you want to print onto on top of your inked-up craft foam shapes (like a craft foam sandwich with inky condiments and paper bread), then roll the whole thing through your pasta machine.  You might have to play with the thickness adjustments of the rollers to see which gives you the best prints (too close and it squishes the ink out too much and blobs, too wide and it doesn't really do anything).

What we made:

So stinkin' cute!  This is a fun and easy project, especially if you want to mass produce a bunch of identical or at least similar images.  If you're just making one print.... it might be more trouble than it's worth.  Just sayin'.