Paper Crafts

Rattle and roll to make this spookily decorated paper.

This is a fabulously fun paper crafts for children. I have mentioned it before at Painting Paper with Balls and Marbles. This variation is perfect for a spooky theme. You start with the same balls and a box to contain the balls, but you use black paper and white paper.

Place the paper in the bottom of the box, it should fit without too much of a gap around the edges. Drip or dab some white paint on the paper for the balls to roll through. Tip in some balls and rock and roll them. The balls will leave a trail of paint where ever they go.

Now add a few spiders to scuttle across the web to see what they find.

This is such a simple paper craft for children.

If you have 3.5 minutes to make a Halloween costume, send your child to find some dark coloured clothes to wear and cut this out of black paper – add some elastic and you are done!

Copy it free hand, or if you have the luxury of 5 minutes available to make it – then print out the PDF template – here and trace the shape onto some black paper and cut it out.

Add some elastic, or a paper strip to hold it on and you are done.

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!

Halloween is the perfect theme for this classic paper craft for children.

So many simple spooky shapes that can be cut out from the folded up paper to make garland of linked images. If you have not made these before, or you want some steps for children to follow, you can use the Paper Garland Tutorial.

The shapes we tried were skulls …

bats …

and my favourite, the ghosts …

I liked the ghosts as there are lots of ways you could do them. If you just wanted to have ghost garlands, you could easily make lots of different shapes ghosts with different expressions.

For all of the garlands the details were added with a pen after the shapes had been cut out.