Paper Quilled Panda

I was browsing the Papyrus store and fell in love with the quilled paper cards.  The colours are vibrant and the designs are intricate.  I wanted to give quilling a try, so I ordered some supplies from Amazon.  It arrived quickly.

There are two things I want to try to make.  One is a quilled panda.

I don’t have a lot of free time... I have a one year old and two older kids.  I managed to start making parts of my panda last night when my baby went to bed.  He miraculously had a long nap this morning, so I was able to finish my panda and a bamboo.

Here’s my first attempt at quilling.

Cardboard car or wagon

If your house is anything like mine... you might have piles of boxes lying around.  One activity we did today was we made a mini cardboard wagon/car.

You need a circular object to trace circles onto scrap pieces of cardboard.  The Amazon.com/Amazon.ca shipping boxes aren't too thick and are easier to cut.  I just traced circles onto the box flaps and used the rest of the box as the wagon.  I cut off the flaps and cut out the circles.  I got my 6 yr old to cut out some of the circles too.  My circles had a 9.5cm diameter, but you can make them any size you want.

The kids decorated the circles (which will become the tires for the car/wagon) and marked the center of each circle.  I poked a hole through the center for them.  After, we line up where we want the tires on the car to go and I use a pencil to poke through the hole on the tire circles to mark the spot on the box.  I poke holes at the marked spots with scissors.

Finally we attach the tires.

I picked up a box of round head paper fasteners from Staples.  These are fun to make clocks, robot arm/leg attachments or if you need to make other moving parts on some sort of creation!  Anyhow, you should have a box of these in your craft drawer!

You just push the fastener through the tire hole and the box hole, then open up the prongs.  I tape down the prongs onto the box.  Then we're done.

I was happy that the wheels do roll across the floor and carpet, but you need to be gentle playing with it.  My 2 yr old kept trying to get into the car and was disappointed when the tires folded over.  I tried to convince her that it was just for toys.  My 6 yr old was more careful with his car.  He didn't mark the center of his tires perfectly so his car is more wobbly.  I guess it just adds character. 

Paper Mâché with kids

Here's a messy activity I did with my 6 year old and 2 year old.  We made paper mache cups.  We still need to paint them and maybe add a coat of glue or something to protect it a little.

What we used:
- 2 cups flour
- 3 cups water
- 2 tsp salt
- 5 disposable plastic cups
- strips of newsprint

We mixed together the flour, water and salt in a big mixing bowl.  Then I poured the mixture into smaller mixing bowls for each kid.  We dipped the strips of newsprint into the bowl, and tried to gently remove the excess before layering the strip onto our plastic cup.  We continued layering on more strips dipped with the paste until we covered the cups several times in different directions.  Then we let our cups dry for 1-2 days before I removed the plastic cup.  I just cut strips of the cup and carefully separated the paper mache from the cup surface.

It's probably easier doing paper ache with a balloon because you can just pop it and remove the balloon, but I didn't happen to have any balloons on hand that afternoon.  You can trim the top edge of the cup or leave it jagged.  We might paint or layer coloured tissue paper with glue/paste to decorate the cups another day.

I have a big water/sand tub table that we worked in and had a mat under that to catch drips that inevitably made their way out of the tub.  It helps to try to smooth out the strips of paper against the cup before layering more strips on top.  You get a stronger cup if there are less air pockets while you're layering the strips.  If you want stronger cups, you can use white glue instead of flour... but with little kids, I prefer sticking with the basics.


Update: Here are the cups we made after painting them and adding a layer of glue on top.

Paper Tree

What can you do with a toilet paper roll?  I rolled up a piece of brown construction paper and slid it into the roll.

At first it was a telescope.  Then the boy wanted to do some cutting... so I had him cut one end of the paper in varying lengths and gently pulling some strands down.  Then it became a tree.  But he wanted leaves too.  So I folded a piece of green construction paper and cut out some leaves (with some leaves connected on one side), and cut slits into the leaves.  Then we just attached them to the branches and voila.  Instant tree.  If you shake the tree, the leaves will fall off.  I guess you can glue them in, but I didn't want to mess around with glue.

It's a quick fun activity and if you have a few more toilet paper rolls and construction paper, you can make a forest of trees.  It's very versatile.  Add some red, orange and yellow leaves for autumn.  Cotton balls if you want snow.

If you're creative, you can probably transform this into a christmas tree.  I envision using green construction paper instead of brown and feather cutting the branches to make pine needles.  Then making and adding decorations.