This is a lovely little craft that actually takes a while to do. It made a great rainy day activity a few weeks ago. But I can't lay claim to it. We were around at a friend's house, and she had a hot glue gun. Now I really do think I need to get one of those as it made the structure that little bit more stable. But I think that will liberal application, and suitable drying time, you'll be able to do the same sort of thing with PVA glue.
The other thing I would change is the base. We only had coloured paper for this. Although it is slightly stiffer than normal paper, I think a card base would be better. Perhaps even using something like a paper plate.
For this project you will need:
- cardboard rolls
- wool or string
- items for decoration and googly eyes if you want to make faces
- glue
First off we used my friend's wool to wrap around the toilet rolls. The boys could pick any colours they wanted to. A variety of colours on a roll looks quite good. At the bottom and top I cut a tiny little notch, and used it to secure in the ends of the wool. For the middle I stuck one end down with a bit of tape, and wound the wool around it.
We used pipe cleaners around the top. These looked a little bit like hair, but also disguise the top of the cardboard tube. We used toilet rolls but you could cut down and use the insides of cling film, wrapping paper, or paper towels for example.
Next we put on the faces. As we used a glue gun it dried fairly quickly but even so we left the tubes at this point to let them dry properly. You may want to leave overnight if using another type of glue. One tip that I've used in the past on similar projects is to put a weight down on the item being glued, especially as wool isn't that easy to adhere to. If that might squash your tube, try clipping it down with a clothes peg.
Finally the tubes were stuck on the base, which in this case was not as sturdy as I'd have liked. It made it awkward to carry home for one thing, as the tubes kept flopping over. One good thing about using glue here is that it also secured in the bottom length of wool, which was also glued to the base. Probably unintentionally - that's the heavy hand of a six year old for you!
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