I love it when we make one craft, that inspires another one. A couple of weeks ago, we made fun dancing skeletons out of paper rolls. My daughter could not get enough of them. We were playing with them this week and making them dance and flip, when all of a sudden, our skeletons started doing flips on their own. We had wound the string on them so tightly that when we pulled the string to straighten it out, the skeletons spun around clumsily on their own. It reminded me of the paper spinners from my childhood. We were so excited, we couldn’t wait to play around with this idea more.
Tag
paper towel
Paper Towel Roll Sculptures
Turn your recyclables into a simple art project that you and your kids will love.
My daughter is a big fan of tinkering with our bin full of recyclables. Cardboard rolls are easily her favorite. She loves to paint them and tie them together, poke holes in them and anything else she can imagine. We found ourselves with an over abundance of paper towel rolls this weekend and wanted to play around with them. What we came up with were these simple paper towel roll sculptures.
Cardboard Tube Haunted House
Recyclables make perfect craft materials. For one, they are free and you just cannot beat that. The other thing is that they are always readily available. I have a huge bin filled with egg cartons and assorted cardboard tubes that I save. I had collected so many tubes, that I had to make something with them.
With Halloween nearing, I had just the haunting craft in mind.
Toilet Paper Tube Scarecrows
We began a little fall decorating this weekend. We bought a bale of hay to use both for a fun sensory bin for my daughter & to pretty up our front yard for the season.
*This post contains affiliate links*
We placed our hay in our front yard in anticipation of going to a local farm over the weekend for scarecrow making & pumpkin and gourd picking. I told my daughter that we were going to place scarecrows on our bale of hay. She told me that she wanted to make a girl scarecrow and a mama scarecrow. All of the scarecrow talk had me inspired to start making some scarecrows right now.
Cardboard Tube Scarecrows
What you will need:
Cardboard Tube
Acrylic Paint
Egg Carton Sections
Yarn
Buttons
Markers
Low Temp Glue Gun (Use caution when operating any glue gun.)
Directions:
Poke a slit on either end of your cardboard roll about 1/3 of the way down. Make it large enough so that the craft stick can slide through.
Take the stick back out & paint the stick in whatever color you will want your scarecrow’s shirt to be. Paint about a 1/4 of the tube in a flesh tone. Then paint half of the remainder in the shirt color & then the other half in the pant color. Let the paint dry.
Paint an egg carton section in whatever color that you want the hat to be & then cut out a wavy circle. Let the paint dry.
Glue the egg carton piece to the center of the foam shape.
Crumple up the foam a little so that it has a more natural hat feel.
Glue strands of yarn to the ends of the craft stick.
Glue a few strands of yarn over the top of the flesh toned area on the tube & then glue the hat on.
Glue more strands under the head & then glue on buttons. Draw a face on the scarecrow with magic markers.
The tubes fit perfectly over a couple of fingers to make fun puppets.
We made a mama scarecrow & a little girl one just as my daughter wanted. She had a ton of fun playing with these. These made a wonderful addition to her already amazing imagination for pretend play.
Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.
Engineering Activity With Recyclables
Last weekend, I threw my sister a baby shower. I had been planning it for months. I made diaper cakes for every table with small woodland stuffed animals on top of each. Each diaper cake was built around a paper towel roll. I made nine cakes in all.
Tie Dye Paper Towel Art
I am looking forward to the nice weather. I can’t wait for the obvious reasons, of course, but I also am excited because I have been itching to make some tie dye. I have plans to make tie dye curtains for our craft room & I wanted to experiment with a few scarves & shirts with some new design ideas. Since it is so messy, I am waiting for the warmer weather to be able to do it outside.
This year, I intend to have my special helper out there dying shirts with me. We may not be able to get outside yet, but we can still dabble in a little bit of tie dying indoors.
All you will need is paper towels, yarn & watered down paints or food coloring. We watered down acrylic paints in rainbow colors.
I showed my daughter how I was wrapping my paper towels with the yarn & let her wrap her own. Make sure that you wrap the yarn snuggly.
We wrapped our paper towels with very little rhyme or reason. Here is one of the wrapped towels.
We dipped the paper towels into the watery paint & dripped paint on with brushes.
When finished, we unraveled the yarn & very carefully opened up the paper towels & laid them out on a piece of cardboard to dry, but I would suggest laying down wax paper. Some of my daughter’s were very wet & stuck a bit to the cardboard.
Wait until they are completely dry before picking up or they might tear.
My daughter thought these were very cool & oohed and aahed over the pretty colors. These were so much fun to make.
When we were done, we cut some of them into flower shapes & made a few flowers out of them. Our flower bouquet came out lovely.
Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.
Toilet Paper Tube North Pole Scenes
Paper Towel Roll Pumpkin & Spider
Our house officially went on the market this week. We did a lot of work to get it picture perfect & ready for showings. We have been packing & cleaning around the clock for weeks. With all of the cleaning that we have been doing, I have gone through a lot of paper towels. I mean a lot. This left me with a lot of empty paper towel tubes & some crafting opportunities.
We worked on a couple of crafts this week to use up some of those empty tubes & here they are.
Paper Towel Roll Pumpkin
What you will need:
An empty paper towel tube
An empty toilet paper tube
Orange paint
Green paint
Green pipe cleaners
Green construction paper
Glue
Directions:
Paint an empty paper towel tube on the inside & out using the orange paint & then let it dry.
Cut a 3″ – 4″ piece of a toilet paper roll. Cut the roll open & paint it green on both ends & let dry.
Cut around the paper towel roll forming 3/4″ strips about 3/4 of the way down.
Round fold the strips starting from the cut end & tuck into the opposite end of the tube as shown.
Roll the green tube up & stick in the opening on top. Add a little extra paint to your pumpkin if needed.
Cut leaves out of construction paper & glue them to the green roll. Cut a green pipe cleaner in half & roll into spirals. Stick them in the stem to finish off your pumpkin craft.
But we were not done there. Mai chose to paint her tube black instead of orange. She wanted to cut her tube too. We chose to make a big spider out of the black tube. In fact we ended up making two because Mai wanted her spider to have a friend.
To make the spider, paint & cut the tube the same as above. Bend the strips out & then make bends for knees & feet.
Push the uncut core down & bend the legs up around it. Add a little glue behind the knees to make the bends stay. Add googly eyes & glue a pipe cleaner to the inside of the tube.
Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.
Toilet Paper Roll Grapes
Before we had our daughter we kept a pretty neat home. We had little knick knacks on our coffee table, there weren’t scuffs & marker on our hardwood floor & I used to have a clean & bare refrigerator. I hated having things on my refrigerator. I thought it looked ugly to have shopping lists & magnets hanging off of it. Fast forward to today & things are a bit different. My kitchen is now an art studio. Our kitchen cabinets, our refrigerator & our kitchen windows are covered with all of my daughter’s arts & crafts.
This would have made the old me cringe, but now it just makes me smile. Since these days our art projects have become part of the decor, I thought at least we could make a craft that matches with our kitchen’s theme. It is Tuscan themed with grapes & vines, so we made a grape craft.
Toilet Paper Roll Grape Craft
Gather a few rolls & snip into 1/4″ rings.
Shape & arrange the rings as you go, to make sure that you have enough cut & map out your project.
Glue each piece into place. Mai helped apply the glue & I put them in place. Let the rings dry.
Let them paint within the glued shapes to make a pretty picture perfect craft & then let dry.
This will make a great addition to our artastic kitchen.
Thank you as always for stopping by. Please follow us on Facebook as well.