Miss G and I have been collecting toilet paper rolls since moving to Kuwait with a certain project in mind (yes, it seems I’ve gotten over my phobia of crafting with something that once was housed in the washroom – phew!) With 30+ rolls now in our collection, we sat down to finally begin our project, and somehow, we ended up doing something completely different. I’m not quite sure what happened… Our paints were out, we were raring to go, and then Miss G mentioned reindeers. The rest is history. Before long, we had this cute little paper roll handprint reindeer, and absolutely no start on our much anticipated project. I guess that’s what happens when you try your best to follow the interests of your child – wonderful unexpected projects! Now I’m not going to lie and say that this is an open-ended project that inspires a ton of creativity – it’s not. Buuut, Miss G is all about ‘making decorations’ for the holidays, and she absolutely loved the process, despite it being quite structured. I figure as long as we’re doing a lot of open-ended creativity-inducing activities, the odd cutesy craft here and there is just fine!
To start, we traced both of her hands on beige card stock.
While I carefully cut the handprints out, Miss G began painting her toilet paper roll brown. Making our own brown paint using the primary colours added to the project too – Grae is always quite fascinated by the process!
She also discovered that in order to fully cover her roll with paint, putting her fingers inside the roll was a good technique.
While waiting for the paper roll to dry, Grae sorted through our supplies and chose two googly eyes and a red foam sticker nose for her reindeer.
Since it still wasn’t fully dry, we blasted the roll with my blowdryer for a couple minutes and then Miss G attached the reindeer’s eyes and nose.
Together we then cut a small slit on either side of the reindeer’s ‘head’ and carefully inserted the handprint antlers.
Here’s the finished product!
We actually ended up making not one reindeer, but two! The one on the left was sweetly named Jennifer, and the one on the right is Baby Gracen. ☺
And if you enjoy crafting with paper rolls, be sure to check out our fun, easy-to-make paper roll shape stamps too!
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