I have a few recipes in my repertoire that require me to stand at the stove whisking a sauce or whatever for up to an hour or more.  It is tiring and boring work, but luckily the results are worth it in the end.  To make my life easier for these food items Waldo kept telling me he was going to buy me one of those self-stirring as-seen-on-TV things.  We were walking around Fred Meyers one day and found the stirrer thing on the shelf for like $5.00.  We tossed it in the cart and decided to make something with it the next week that would use it.  I ended up making a tomato sauce and put the stirrer to the test.  It flunked! It flunked like a frat boy that hasn’t been to class all semester and drank his brains out.  It hardly moved around the pan and after about 7 minutes I took it out and finished stirring the sauce myself.

I knew this thing was never going to be used in the kitchen again so I decided to see what kind painting instrument it would make.

I started out by dropping globs of paint on a paper in a open cardboard box*.

Lil put the stirrer in the box and we turned it on.

It did the same thing in the box that it did in my sauce pan. It drifted to one corner and stayed there. I showed Lil how she could gently move it around.

I was pretty impressed with how the first one turned out, even if Lily’s paint choice wasn’t my favorite.

I didn’t like how all the paint got corralled in the middle because of the sweeper arm so I cut it off. I figured this thing was never going to by used for sauce so I didn’t need it.

* I use this box for a lot of different art and painting projects. It’s just a little bigger than 8×11, so paper fits great. Sometimes I use a little tape on the underside of the paper to keep it down, but it’s usually not necessary. It contains messes nicely, however marbles will still fly out of given enough shaking.

I cleaned the feet of the stirrer between every painting so the colors were clean.

The little stirrer vibrated crazy fast and the way the colors mixed was a surprise to me. I really like how these last turned out. They are the newest addition to the art wall.

My phone doesn’t do the colors justice.

I was so excited about this project, I thought Lil would love it, but sometimes you just can’t tell with her which way she’s going to go with something.  So I so so relieved when she loved it. We give Robo-stir painting a 7 out of 10 crayon review. 🙂