flat people

Posted on April 21, 2013 by happyhooligans

Flat people: make a family of paper dolls with a piece of cardboard and a few toilet roll tubes.

Remember the simple joy of playing with paper dolls when you were a child? Well, you can provide your hooligans with a set of their own, by making a set of flat people with a few simple household items.

Round up your supplies:

Thin cardboard or sturdy card stock
a couple of toilet paper or paper towel tubes
fine point marker
scissors

I used a light weight cardboard box for my flat people, and one paper towel roll was enough for me to make the bases for all of the dolls that I made on this day.

Cut a hmmmm….what shape is that? I’m not sure, but see the shape in the next photo? Cut out one of first out of a scrap piece of cardboard or paper, to serve as a template for your people.

Now cut out as many pieces as you will need for your family of flat people. I cut some of my pieces shorter than the others. Those will become the baby and the pets.

Now draw your family members on those pieces. They don’t have to be fancy. Simple is best in my books. Add in a few small animals for fun.

To make the base for each flat person, slice a piece off your cardboard tube, and make two cuts opposite each other on the top side of the base.

Now, slip your paper doll into those cuts.

Awwww. How cute are then? And how easy was that?

You can leave your flat people as is, or have your child paint or colour them.

Here’s a set that we coloured a few years ago.

So far I’ve left this year’s set as is, but on a rainy day, when we’re looking for something to do, I’ll have the hooligans jazz ‘em up.

If this is your first visit to Happy Hooligans, I’d love for you to pop over and LIKE us on facebook. I update my page daily with easy and affordable arts, crafts and play ideas.

You can follow me on Pinteres t too! I have over 90 boards dedicated to all kinds of kids’ crafts and activities, as well as some personal interest boards too.

See you there!

Easter egg napkin rings

Posted on March 28, 2013 by happyhooligans

Easter napkin rings created in Eric Carle fashion…

After seeing a wonderful post by Dilly Dali Art, we were inspired to make Easter egg napkin rings, using papers that I created to look like Eric Carle’s artwork.

I’m going to send you over to Dilly Dali Art’s Eric Carle post to learn about this simple and fun painting process, and then you can pop right back here to see one of several projects that we made with our Eric Carle papers.

Are you back? Wasn’t that fabulous? Would you ever have guessed that THAT’S how he created The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

One thing that I did differently is I painted on waxed paper rather than tissue paper. Although I ended up painting all of the papers ahead of time, I originally thought the hooligan might paint them, and I thought waxed paper would be easier for them to work with.

For my painting tools, I used brushes, sponges, and that plastic netting that fruits and veggies are packaged in.

Aren’t these papers gorgeous?

I was so excited by how they turned out, and how much they really look like the pictures in Eric Carle’s books!

I wasn’t really sure what we would make with them, so after brainstorming for a day or two, I came up with several ideas.

These napkin rings are one of my ideas, and the others, I’ll share with you, as we do them.

For the napkin rings, I simply cut a paper towels rolls into small rings, and we painted those with acrylics in Easter colours.

After cutting the Easter eggs out of our painted papers, I glued them onto some white cardboard, and then cut those out. Then we glued them all to our paper towel rings.

Won’t these look sweet on the table on Easter Sunday?

For your convenience, I’m including the following Amazon Affiliate links in this post.

As always, all photos in this post were shot with my Canon Rebel XS

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:

happy hooligans

Tag Archives: toilet roll crafts