Playing With Colour at the Museum of Childhood

Activities

Attractions

Published on Saturday, 11 August 2012 09:00

Last Updated on 22 August 2012

Monica Costa

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Messy playing with colour is amazing whether you are a child or an adult. Personally I cannot resist colouring and messing around with paints …. Maybe it’s a bit childish but summer holidays are a great time for us parents to play more with kids. And colours are just perfect tools to start with!

Being based in SW London and spoilt for choice with activities for kids, we may often stay in SW London without exploring much else around the Capital. Encouraged by an amazing sunny day, a group London Mums and mummy bloggers recently attended a wonderful event hosted by HP at the Museum of Childhood in East London . All the activities were designed to show how incredible the printing process is and how the hours of research and development undertaken by HP into their paper and inks pays off.

We found out that each ink takes between three to five years and more than 1,000 prototype formulations to perfect. With more than 100 new inks developed by HP’s engineers and scientists over the past 20 years, millions of dollars of investment ensure the very best technology is available to fit inside the printers.

We took funny photos with a seaside backdrop and we got our images printed onto HP’s Premium plus photo paper designed with a porous coating technology that delivers instant dry photos but also water resistance to your prints.

Knowing what different shades and colours you can create with four standard colours is a fun and educational activity. There are in fact 72 million colour combinations possible from four standard colours that are used in HP inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. We wanted to bring this to life in a fun way that anyone could take part with and the type of challenge that could be replicated at home.

Welcoming over 400,000 visitors through its doors every year, the V&A Museum of Childhood in London’s Bethnal Green houses the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection of childhood-related objects and artefacts, spanning the 1600s to the present day.

The Museum has an extraordinary and varied collection of over 4,000 dolls, the earliest being a wooden paddle doll dating from 1,300BC. The dolls represent men, women, and boys and girls from all around the world, as well as many fantasy and fairytale characters. They are also made from a wide range of materials – from traditional materials such as wood, cloth, ceramic, wax and plastic to more unusual ones like dried fruit, mutton bones and hair.

There is also an amazing collection of Barbie and Sindy dolls which I personally loved. We had the honour to have a special visit in the vaults where there are lots of new collections and toys which will be catalogued and shown in due course.
The V&A Museum of Childhood is definitely one of the best museums in the Capital and worth a visit.