Paper Crafts

Make someones day by crafting up a totally cool pen for them.

I love paper crafts for children that involve their own creativity in making a gift for someone special. You may need to get them to make a few of these pens as they will want to keep one for themselves.

This idea was inspired by painted sticks at Creative Jewish Mom’s blog. When I saw them I thought that I would love to be able to use them to write and draw with.

We created our own sticks by wrapping some pens with papier mache. We tore up some newspaper into little strips and used wallpaper paste to glue the paper onto the pens. Of course you need to make sure that the pen is clicked on before you start! To create the shape on the pen with the ball at the end we also folded and squished some paper and attached it with more strips of paper and paste.

Then it was just a matter of waiting till they dried, hiding them in a bag of other projects, finding them again, burying them under a pile of decorated paper, uncovering them, sitting them on the coffee table for a week, and them painting them. An extension is to then decide that you do not like one of them and paint over the top of it with white paint – them repeat from the beginning of this paragraph.

This is a simple craft that is easy for children to create, and a great way for them to make a gift and display their special art work.

We have used corrugated cardboard to make our frame, it is nice and thick so that there is plenty of room between the layers for your artwork.

For the backing start off with some bits of card that are both the same size, cut a ‘U’ shape out of one piece.

Glue the ‘U’ shape onto the back piece.

Glue some pieces of white paper over the two pieces of cardboard to tidy it all up and to give it a white background suitable for painting if you wish.

To make the front of the frame cut a piece of decorative card a tiny but bigger than the backing card. Cut a hole in it that is a little smaller than the ‘U’ shape card. In our example we wanted to use some paper that we had previously decorated with scraped paint, so we backed it with some red card to make it stronger.

Glue this on top of the backing piece and your frame is done.

Then you can slot in a special picture or photo – ours has a really cool cartoon horse that my 10 year old created.

This decorative topper for a pencil ticks lots of paper crafts for children requirements!

It is quick and easy and the results are great. And although mess is an important part of arts and crafts with children, sometimes we need something that is no mess, and this craft is one of those. It is also a cheap way of making a useful little gift for someone. We have used paper already printed with a pattern for our flower pencil topper but to make it more personal you could use decorated paper from something like painting with balls or wheels or leaf printing.

I have made a flower pencil topper tutorial which shows all the steps, but in summary the steps are …
1. You need an oblong/rectangle piece of paper.
2. Fold it a few times and cut slits in it from one end almost all the way to the other end. Cut parallel to the fold lines but make sure you do not cut the fold lines.
3. Unfold and then wrap the paper around the pencil and tape in place. Pattern to the inside and cut bits at the top.
4. Bend down the cut bits of paper to open them up like a flower. If you want you can also roll some of the paper strips around a pencil to curl them.

This an easy paper craft for children, and they make a fabulous bunch of flowers!

I like the impact of these in red and we have this bunch of gorgeous hand shape lilies in our bathroom – a real splash of color! Nice and easy to make, you just need some paper, a child’s hand to trace around, scissors to cut the shape and tape to hold the shape in a tube. You also need pipe cleaners to make the stem and stamen.

This would make a lovely gift for someone special to the child. As well as being a lovely bunch of flowers they are also part of the clever crafty child.

All the steps are detailed at the Paper Hand Lily Tutorial. I made the tutorial using white paper so you can see both options and decide which one you prefer.

Effective way to use decorated paper

I think that sometimes we forget to use some of the simple techniques. This one most of us will have done when we were children, and it is worth doing it with our children. Paper weaving is also a great way to make use of some of those beautiful children’s artworks that are created with paper decorating techniques like the Painting with Balls and Wheels paper that we have used for our weaving.

I like to set up the children’s paper crafts so that they can do most of it themselves, so for the weaving we cut the strips on the base sheet all the way from one edge. If you cut strips using a craft knife only in the middle of the paper, as in the yellow paper in the picture, it will look better. But young children cannot use the craft knives or weave in the paper like the yellow example as easily, so I suggest cutting all the way to one edge as in the pink example in the picture.

Once the paper is cut take your decorated paper and cut it into strips and weave in and out of the base paper.

We weaved in two slightly different ways. The first example we cut wavy lines and also did not push the strips up tightly. Err – an admission, another Sarah boo boo, I cut the paper the wrong way to start with so we did not end up with enough to weave tightly, but I reckon it still works out fine like this.

So in the second example I thought a tiny bit more before cutting and then had enough paper to weave tightly. We played around with weaving from different angles as well, and left a space for a car picture as this example used the decorated paper made with the toy car wheel prints.

Now I will get them laminated and they will be used as placemats. Easy to wipe clean and great to look at.

All you need for this super cheap craft is newspaper, wallpaper paste or white glue, scrap cardboard and some paints.

	Fill a bowl or bucket with torn bits of newspaper. Cover the paper with warm water and leave to soak for 24 hours.
	Pour off the water and slowly mix in wallpaper paste or white glue until the mixture feels like dough or soft clay. It is now ready to use.
	To make a small shape like a fridge magnet or brooch, cut a shape out of cardboard.
	Shape the pulp onto the cardboard.
	Leave the shapes to dry. Depending how thick the pulp is, this can take a few days.
	Paint a layer of white paint onto the shapes to make a plain background.
	Finish with lots of bright paints and fun designs.

Download the printable version of the worksheet – PDF Worksheet – Papier Mache Pulp

For more information about Papier Mache, check out my What is Papier Mache? article.