toilet roll Easter bunnies

Posted on March 26, 2013 by happyhooligans

Craft up an adorable Easter bunny with a toilet roll tube and some craft sticks!

With the holiday weekend approaching, we are just crafting up a storm here! We’ve made Easter finger puppets, adorable toilet roll peeps in paper bag nests, stained glass eggs, and our latest creation is these toilet roll Easter bunnies!

Like most of the stuff we make here, these are totally easy to make, and require only a few basic supplies.

What you’ll need:

toilet roll tube
2 wide craft sticks
googly eyes
small pom pom, bead or button for nose
large pom pom for tail
white craft foam for teeth
glue (a glue gun is handy for the ears)
paint and/or glitter paint
(whiskers would be cute too, but I didn’t even think about that until just now!)

For your convenience, I’ve included links to Amazon Affiliates in this post:

Making your bunnies:

To make things a little easier, I used a glue gun to attach the ears to the inside of the toilet roll when I was prepping the craft. Older children could do that step themselves.

Give your toilet roll and ears a coat or two of paint. You can see that we gave some an additional coat of glitter paint which added a nice shimmer to our bunnies.

Cut a set of bunny teeth out of a piece of white foam or card stock.

Glue the eyes, nose, teeth and tail all in place, give an extra little shot of paint to the inside of the bunnies’ ears, and you’re done!

How cute are these little guys? And see that paint chip Easter Egg garland in the background? Pop on over to Modern Parents Messy Kids to get the scoop on those!

Happy Easter!

toilet roll Peeps

Posted on March 22, 2013 by happyhooligans

Toilet roll Peeps and paper bag nests…

Remember the simple paper bag nests that I shared with you yesterday?

And remember I told you I’d show you what we filled them with in a later post?

Well, heeeeere they are…

The inspiration for these toilet roll Peeps came from the toilet roll chicks that we made last year. I wanted to make them look a little more like Marshmallow Peeps this year though so we went with a variety of pastel colours. I’m not terribly certain that these little guys actually look like Peeps, but they were fun to make, and they sure are cute!

Here’s what you’ll need for your Peeps:

cardboard tubes (toilet roll/paper towel roll/wrapping paper tube etc)
paints in pastel colours
matching tissue paper
googly eyes or small black buttons
card-stock or construction paper “beaks”

For your convenience, I’ve included Amazon Affiliate links in this post.

How we made ‘em:

To start, the hooligans painted their cardboard tubes: one purple, one yellow and one blue. To prevent us from ending up with multi-coloured Peeps, I set out one colour of paint at a time. We used acrylic craft paints. Acrylics are my favourite type of paint for crafting with. The colours are vibrant, the coverage is great, the colours are rich, and they dry very quickly. No, they are not washable, so yes, there may be stains, but if you dress your child in old clothing when crafting, or whip up one of our easy re-purposed denim aprons, you won’t have to worry about it.

Once the paints were dry (a blast with the hairdryer speed the drying process up even more), the kids added eyes and beaks, and stuffed a tuft of tissue paper into the top of the toilet roll.

Nestle these little guys into your paper bag nests to complete this super-sweet Easter craft!

One of the questions that I’m most frequently asked is “what kind of camera do you use?” I shoot with a Canon Rebel XS. It’s an entry-level DSLR, and it’s my baby! I do not digitally enhance or alter my photos in any way except to add the title and my blog name to the feature photo in each blog post. I LOVE my Canon Rebel! You can check it out here:

paper bag nests

Posted on March 21, 2013 by happyhooligans

Make a bird’s nest out of a paper bag…

I had a great, little Easter craft planned for this morning, (I’ll share it in a later post), but I was stumped about one part of it: how to make an easy bird’s nest. I’d thought about it for a couple of days – we could use shredded paper or cooked and dried spaghetti, or maybe even Easter grass, but none of those ideas were really wowing me. Then, when I was pulling out some supplies for the other part of the craft (the one that I’ll blog about later), it came to me. We could make paper bag nests! And so we did!

This is super easy to do! All you need is a paper bag and a pair of scissors.

Cut the top off your paper bag leaving 3 or 4 inches of the bottom part of the bag to work with.

Now, taking care so you don’t rip the bag, kind of fold/roll the edge of the bag outward.

Continue to loosely roll the bag until you get to the bottom, and then just kind of scrunch it here and there to shape your nest.

That’s all there is to it. Beats the pants of cooking and drying a batch of spaghetti doesn’t it?

Be sure to check back in tomorrow to see what we put in our paper bag nests!

Easter egg garland

Posted on April 6, 2012 by happyhooligans

Easter Garland – painting with golf balls…

Each of the hooligans made an Easter egg garland last week using one of our favourite painting techniques: painting with golf balls. We love this activity. It’s super-simple, and it never fails to impress!

First you’ll want to find a cardboard box that will be deep enough to contain your golf-balls as they zing and bounce around. Handles are a bonus.

Cut your cardboard or paper to fit the box, and have the kiddos squirt, drizzle, or dab their paint onto their “canvas”.

Pop that into the box, and start shakin’!

Oooooh, and Aaaaaah over your masterpiece. Isn’t it purdy?

You’re free to turn this into whatever you’d like, but we had Easter garlands in mind, so I cut as many eggs as I could out of the paintings, and punched a couple of holes in the top of each egg.

Then the Hooligans strung them together with wool and a “sewing needle”.

Ok – super excited to share this little trick. Somehow all of our plastic sewing needles have gone missing, so I improvised with a drinking straw. Cut your straw to the desired length, and make a little slit in one end. Feed your wool through the straw, and slide it into the slit to secure.