Showing posts with label easy kids crafts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label easy kids crafts. Show all posts

23.5.20

Pretty toilet paper roll butterflies!



I love butterfly crafts, and this is a very straightforward one. A great excuse to use lots of bright colours too!

You will need:
Toilet paper rolls
Paints (we used bottles of poster paints)
Scissors
Pencil
Pipe cleaner

1. Paint your tubes first. To get a really nice mix of bright colours, put two or three blobs of colours that work well together on different plates (ones that don't make sludgy brown when mixed!). 

Like yellow and red, blue and white, or blue and yellow, green and yellow, yellow and pink, or blue, pink and white. White added to any of these colour combos looks great. We had some ready mixed purple too, which looked lovely with the pink and the blue.

This is a great way for kids to experiment with colour mixing, using a simple palette of complementary colours. Give them a big brush to paint with (we often use a pastry brush) - this helps with the mixing and with speed.. and then let them loose!

We painted the inside of the tubes as well, but you really don't need to. Works just as well without.


Mixing up the complementary colours gives a lovely marbly or sort of tie-dye effect. But if you wanted to do stripes of colours instead, or add some dots, that's totally up to you!


2. When the paint is dry, flatten a tube with your hand and press along the creases, so it's easier to draw on.

3. Use a pencil to mark the outline of your butterfly - for the butterfly body, mark about 3cm/1in along the crease, on the left-hand-side. To get the proportions of the top and bottom wings right, we drew this body line a little closer to the bottom of the tube than the top.

(As a guide, our TP roll was about 10cm, the body line starts 4cm from the top of the tube, and finishes roughly 3cm from the bottom of the tube.

Draw a curved line from the top of the body line to the top right-hand corner.

Make a pencil mark halfway down the body line on the LHS.

Draw a straight line from the right-hand edge towards this mark, but leave a gap (of about 2cm).

From the end of this line in the centre of the tube, draw a big curve down to the bottom right-hand corner.

Then, from the bottom of the body line on the LHS, draw another sweeping curve towards the same corner, but for fuller bottom wings, don't take this line right to the corner, stop a little before. See photo below.




4. Cut out your butterfly, cutting through the doubled-over card.  With the middle section, it's easier if you cut along the straight line first, then cut along the curve below, starting at the bottom right-hand corner.


5. Cut away a little sliver of the top wing crease. Cut it at a slight angle. See below.

Don't cut off too much!


6. Open up your butterfly. The natural curve of the tube makes a lovely shape.


7. Bend a pipe-cleaner in half and hook it around the middle of your butterfly.

Twist the two pieces together to fasten, then wrap one tightly around the other, to make a head.



When you're happy, decide how long you want the antennae to be and trim the pipe-cleaners, allowing a little extra if you want to bend over the pointy tips so they're not so sharp. Bend into shape.






8. We made so many butterflies we needed somewhere to put them! So we painted some old cardboard packaging brown (you could leave it its natural colour) and cut out a tree trunk and some branches.

We glued them all onto some brown wrapping paper with pva craft glue. But didn't stick down the very ends of the branches, so they stuck out a bit.

Then attach a paper clip to the pipe-cleaner on the underside of a butterfly and clip this onto the end of a branch.

If you don't want to be able to remove them, you could of course glue the butterflies onto the tree.







5.6.18

Egg carton sheep

egg carton sheep

These sheep are the first project in 'Make Your Own Farm Animals' and they're really quick to do - a few egg boxes, cotton wool and a black felt tip, and you'll have your own flock before you know it!

You will need:
Egg carton
Pencil
Scissors
Cotton wool
Glue
Black felt tip pen (or a Sharpie if you're happy to use a permanent pen)

1. Cut out an egg cup, roughly first, then neaten up the edge. Turn it upside down and draw a cross on top with a pencil (see below), and continue the lines down the sides of your egg cup.
This should give you four well spaces legs.


2. Use a black felt tip pen or a Sharpie to colour in the bottom part of the legs, so they are more chunky.



3. With your scissors, snip up the sides of each leg (8 snips) - don't worry if you snip too far, you'll soon be covering the top part with cotton wool.


4. Snip the card HALFWAY BETWEEN each leg too (4 snips)


5. Push all the flaps of card, between the legs, under your sheep, leaving the four legs down.



6. Cover the top of the egg cup with a thin layer of glue. Tease out a small piece of cotton wool with your fingers and stick it on top of your sheep. A small amount of cotton wool looks best.



7. Draw a head on either the egg carton lid or some spare cereal box card. Keep the shape simple so it's easier to cut out.


8. Use the black pen to draw two circles where you would like the eyes to go and colour-in around the circles. Add a black dot in the eye if you want. Glue in place.



9. For a lying down sheep, cut a shallower egg cup from your carton and cover the whole thing with cotton wool. Glue on the head.


TIP: A white correction pen (like Tipp-Ex) is handy for eyes if you want to add them after colouring-in the head, or you want to make a sleeping sheep with closed eyes.



Many more animal projects like this in my book, 'Make Your Own Farm Animals'



8.6.17

Make a city scene - crafts for kids


I've been going through A LOT of cardboard tubes recently, and the city tubescapes we did a few weeks back got me thinking about making a bigger city scene that could be added to and played with. The first thing was to make the tubes less, well, tubey.....!

You'll need:
Cardboard tubes (toilet paper and kitchen paper tubes)
Scissors
Paint
Black felt tip or gel pen
For the trees:
Cereal box card
Brown felt tip
Glue stick
Grey paper (or painted paper) for the street

1. Take your toilet paper tube or kitchen paper tube and flatten it on the table with you hand. Press firmly along the two creases.


2. Squeeze the tube open, line up the two creases you've just made, and flatten with your hand - making two more creases. Press firmly along them both again.



3. If you want to make your buildings different heights, this is a good time to cut across your flattened tube. Now, when you squeeze it back into shape, instead of being round, you should have more of a square shape.



4. Paint your buildings any colours you like, or leave some plain, like we did.


If you want to make trees, this would be a good time to paint some cereal box card green. Try two different colours of green. Add more blue to make a darker shade.

5. When the paint's dry, press along the creases again, to get them back into shape, then use the black pen to add windows. Draw small rectangles, colour some in and leave others open. Add any extra details you want - Daisy made a hospital, shop and a bakery. It's absolutely up to you!




6. For the tree base, cut a strip of plain cereal box card. The trees can be any size you want, but if you want them to be a similar size to ours, keep the width of the strip to about 2cm/3/4in or less.  Cut the strip into similar sized pieces, no more than about 3cm/1in. long (these measurements are just a guide, the card pieces don't need to be identical or precise).

7. Now, fold in both ends of a piece of card, so you leave a small section in the middle between the folds. This is going to be the trunk of your tree and shouldn't be too wide. It might take a minute or two to get the hang of the folding, but again it doesn't need to be precise, as long as the card piece sits steady.


8. Make a small snip down both creases (snip a little extra out to make it easier to slot in the treetop later) - then cut a 'V' between the slots for the tree's branches.



9. Keeping in mind the size of your tree base, draw a treetop shape on the painted green card and cut it out. Keep the shape simple if you prefer.


10. Draw the trunk on the tree base with a brown felt tip pen.


11. Rub some glue on the back of the branches only, and slot the treetop in place. Leave it flat to dry (you could weigh it down with a book).
Fold the flaps back and your tree is ready!