Paper Crafts

This activity first appeared in a Paper Crafts for Children newsletter. This toilet paper roll critter has crawled out of the newsletter and onto this blog in time for Halloween.

The next newsletter is due out in the next week to 10 days, so join up soon to ensure you get it. The timing of the send out depends on the weather this weekend, if it is fine we will try out our new tent and go camping and the newsletter will be delayed by a few days!

The following is straight from the newsletter …

This is creepily cute! I was so impressed with what excellent legs our finger shapes made on our spider. Keep it away from easily frightened folk!

	You will need: - a toilet roll, stapled close at each end as pictured
	- hand shapes, minus the thumbs, traced onto black paper
	Then you need to: - Paint the squashed toilet paper roll black. - Glue the hand shapes to the bottom of the spider and bend the fingers to create the legs. - Add spidery decorations like a glittery red back.
	Consult with the closest expert on spider anatomy – in this case it was my son, and then add the desired number of eyes. He thought that they had two big eyes and up to six little ones – sounded good to me. He commented they would not be in a nice tidy row like I have done, but it is so cute with them in a row and that is important on toilet paper roll spiders!

We had so much fun making the black one, we made another one which is species spidery rainbowish, a very rare type of spider only found in paper boxes.

We took two of our recent paper crafts for children projects and combined them to make these very cool hanging Halloween garlands.

We started with the Halloween fold out garland craft bats, skulls, ghosts and some witches hats that had not looked so good in the fold out craft.

We introduced them to our hanging decorative garland and then blended both ideas.

To create the hanging garland from the fold out one, you need to cut your fold out creations into pairs, fold them so they are closed, you may need to fold some the other way so any decorations you have added are facing out. Cut some string and glue the pairs together with the string running in between them. Then hang them for all to admire and to duck under as they move about the place!

These are really very pretty – and pretty easy to make too.

Start with two or three different pieces of colored paper and cut some circles out of them. You only need two circles from each color, but the more you cut, the more garlands you can make. Fold all the circles in half, draw a half circle on each folded piece of paper and cut it out. On the smaller half circle, draw and cut out a half heart shape. Aim to end up with a series of folded shapes as pictured below. Unfold all the shapes. Spread glue on one shape and lay some string on it, lay a matching shape of a different color on top. Keep adding more shapes to the garland. You can decorate the shapes with glitter – but we quite liked it plain.

Hands and paint are a great combination! Use them both to create this rather cool hand print octopus.

She is simple to do, but a few little tricks bring her to life. Make two blue hand prints on white paper, over lap the palm section and move the fingers round for the second print.

The white paper works it magic when you cut out the octopus shape and leave some white paper around her as you cut. Add a mouth and eyes and then put on a sea-green background for a splash-tastic hand print octopus. Leaving a white edge as you cut is a great trick for something that you are going to mount on a dark background – it really brings it to life.

This background is made with wallpaper paste and dye or food colorings mixed together. It makes a jewel like mix which dries with a nice sea like effect.

Don’t forget about some of the great fun to be had with the classic paper crafts for children like collage.

Collage can be made with all sorts of materials, and that is part of the fun of it! If you want some more information about collage I have an article – What is Collage?

I like how these two collage use many of the different gorgeous papers we have at home. My daughter and I sorted through a treasure trove of paper and selected some to make a fruity collage. I worked on just one fruit, but my daughter was much more ambitious and created a whole bowlful!

These glasses or binoculars made from toilet paper rolls are fun for children to make and fun for them to spy things with.

Paper crafts that make things children can play with are double the fun. To make these groovy glasses you just need two toilet paper rolls – or rolls of cardboard if you prefer, and some scraps of paper and cellophane.

	We used another toilet paper roll and cut the end off it to make the joining piece on our glasses. You can also just glue the two cardboard rolls together.
	We wanted a rosy tinted view of the world so we taped cellophane over one end of the glasses.
	To cover the toilet paper rolls, and the taped bits of the cellophane, we glued a couple of layers of tissue paper over them.
	Of course all good glasses have eyelashes, so we cut some strips into some pieces of paper and curled them around a pencil.
	Perfect!