Showing posts with label 4th of July. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4th of July. Show all posts

4th of July Fireworks Craft

After another craft fail, I needed to do something fast using all the supplies we already had out with the paint.  My girls were not going to move on from the craft fail unless we did something else right away. I found a nice easy Patriotic painting craft courtesy of Crafts~N~Things for Children blog. Google is my friend. A nice red, white and blue American craft.

These are nice since we may not see 'real' fireworks on the 4th of July. We live in the desert and sometimes due to extreme fire dangers they have to cancel them.
4th of July Firework Craft
Fireworks!
Fairly simple since we only needed the three Ps:
  • Paper
  • Paint
  • Pipe Cleaners
  • Scissors
Pipe cleaners for Patriotic Craft
Pipe Cleaners. They can be any color.
1. Cut the pipe cleaners to create what the girls first thought looked like a flower. Once they had it twisted and laid out the way they wanted them, they accepted they were fireworks.

Pipe Cleaner Firework
A Firework with a handle.
2. Dip the firework into the paint. Place more paint on with a brush if you want a fuller look.

dipping firework craft into the paint
Adding paint to the firework.
3. Stamp the paint coated piper cleaner onto the paper.
painted fireworks craft
Painted firework print on paper.
4. Repeat # 2 & #3 for each color.

When stamping down the pipe cleaner firework my girls wanted it thicker so they pressed with their fingers. You can see finger smudge and smear marks on the paper. If you want to avoid that, use a stick instead.
pipe cleaner firework for painting
Fireworks stamp painted for the holiday.

stamp painted pipe cleaner holiday fireworks craft
Stamp painted firework on black background.
Once they were done with the pipe cleaner fireworks, they moved onto painting all kinds of things red, white and blue. There were the small boxes, small cardboard left over from the boxes, and the paper plates themselves.
holiday craft memorial day fireworks flag homemade
Red, white and blue everywhere!
After the paint stamped fireworks were dry, the girls decided they needed to add glitter glue. Where would fireworks be without glitter glue? After that, they declared they were done.
pipe cleaner painted craft 4th of July fireworks
Fireworks with the glitter glue touch.
Have a wonderful Day of Independence celebrating the 4th of July!


Another Craft Failure

Sometimes I wonder where is my common sense. I wanted to do a fun holiday craft with my girls. I saw this neat banner on Country Living and thought, "Oh, we could do a variation of that for our craft."
Craft banner from country living http://www.countryliving.com/syndication/fourth-july-crafts-syn#slide-1
Banner craft from Country Living website.
For a very novice craft person (yes, I said it) little warnings should have gone off when I thought 'variation'. 
http://www.countryliving.com/syndication/fourth-july-crafts-syn#slide-2
Rosettes for the banner from County Living.
Here was my erroneous thinking. We would dip newspaper into paint to create a red, white and blue type fan flower. See, if you are a 'crafter' you already know where this is going.


What made me think that water based paint would work on paper? Now that I think about it, wet newspaper is a disaster unless you are making paper mache. I clearly hadn't thought it through.


All the paint did was make wet newspaper.


I put them out in the hot sun to dry. I was still delusional enough to think maybe when they dried it would look better.

It just turned out to be a mess as I tried to create the 'fan'.  Another craft fail. I have got to stick with what I know. If I am going to try to be original then I need to try it out before I sit down with the kids to do it. My girls were not impressed. They wanted to paint and they wanted to paint now. I was able to find them something quickly. It saved the day. See my next post for the 4th of July craft that succeeded. Until next time, may all your crafts work out better than mine.