For my first kids' activity post I wanted to share something really bright and colorful for summer: DIY animal decorations made with buttons. It's a project you can either do as a team, together with your kids as young as 5 or a project your older creatives can do on their own. You can use this technique not only to make room decoration like I'm going to show you today, you can also make cards with it or customize notebooks. Are you ready? Let's do this!
You will need
- Computer
- Printer
- Sturdy drawing paper
- A good amount of buttons (small, big, colored, ...)
- Glue stick
- Black fineliner pen
- Protective sheet for your table
Preparation
While your older kids might want to draw something themselves, your younger ones need a little more guiding and help. Have a look around the internet for some fun figures (animals, cars, houses, ...) and choose the ones you want, together with your child. Then either use PicMonkey or a free program like Gimp to adjust the image to a watercolor version of itself. If you're not that tech-savvy you can download 2 printables at the bottom of the post. One of this very cute giraffe I'm showing you today, one of two equally cute elephants. Once you have finished adjusting the image go ahead and print it onto the drawing paper. It will then look something like this:
Glue time!
To protect your table from getting all covered in glue it's a smart idea to cover it with some plastic or cardboard. This way your child can have fun without making a mess. If you don't have anything to protect the table with, don't worry. You can remove crafting glue from almost any surface with warm water and some washing up liquid.
To glue the buttons onto the paper, all you need is a simple crafting glue stick. It's a forgiving project as you can still move the buttons around for a little while after you have glued them to the paper. Nonetheless, after a few minutes the buttons will be glued firmly to the page and will not be falling off any time soon. If you use larger and heavier buttons you'll want to use some sort of super glue but make sure you are the one using strong glues as your child might glue some fingers together, which we do not want to happen.
Especially for children who are not very good at crafting, drawing, coloring, ... using buttons is a good way to give them a chance to make something beautiful they can be proud of. They can hardly do anything wrong with this technique and the buttons make it look super fancy. This activity has already put a smile on many of my kids' faces in class and I'm positive it will also have the same affect on yours.
Colors
For these kinds of projects I love to stay within a certain color scheme: yellows and oranges, blues, pinks and reds, greens, purples and pinks, greys, ... instead of using the colors altogether. This will instantly make your project eye-catching and beautiful. For this giraffe I stayed as close as possible to the original and went with yellow and orange but it's very fun to make blue elephants, red frogs or green airplanes!
Contour
When you are ready gluing all the buttons you can either leave it this way or you can add a few little black contour lines. For this giraffe I chose to add some, as they were already part of the printed design. The lines don't need to be perfect, you can easily do this together with your child, hand in hand. I used a black fineliner pen but for other figures it might even be more fun to use a bigger and bolder line, that's totally up to you.
To download the printables, click the images below (not the pin button!). The image will enlarge, right click > save as.
