An adorable Santa craft for kids to make with paint sticks and yarn. Fun to play with or to hang on the Christmas tree.
I’m so excited to share this sweet little Santa craft with you today! We made this paint stick Santa Craft the other day though, and it’s so cute we’ve just been busting to show it to you.
See all of our Santa Crafts here.
The idea for this yarn-wrapped Santa came from the yarn-wrapped paint stick dolls the hooligans make on a regular basis. The girls love making those with yarn and fabric scraps.
You may also like our Paper Plate Santa with Popcorn Beard!
When I was planning for our Christmas craft day recently, I spotted a batch of unused paint sticks, and I thought it would be fun to turn them into Santas similar to the way we make our dolls.
They’re kind of like our popsicle stick Santas, but we didn’t use yarn to make those. We just painted the popsicle sticks.
With the paint sticks being wider and longer than the popsicle sticks, there’s more room to get a little more creative. So I grabbed the yarn and googly eyes and a few other goodies, and we were all set.
Supplies for a Paint Stick Santa
- Paint sticks
- flesh coloured paint
- red, black and white yarn
- googly eyes
- craft jewels (belt buckle)
- pom pom
- paint brush
- white glue
- scissors
- pencil (optional for planning)
Instructions:
To get the kids involved in the planning process, I had them use a pencil to mark the blocks of colour on their paint stick for their Santas’ hats, faces, belt and boots. That way they could get a good idea of proportions and know where their colours would go when they got using the paint and yarn.
They began by painting their Santas’ faces. Note: this step isn’t really necessary. We realized once we got painting that the flesh coloured paint wasn’t all that different than the colour of the paint stirrers, and that we could’ve actually left the face area unpainted. Oh well, painting is always fun, right?
Next step: the yarn. The kids cut long lengths of red yarn for Santa’s suit and some white yarn for his beard and the trim of his hat. We were lucky enough to have some fluffy, white yarn that was perfect for the job.
When you start wrapping, you can glue down your first bit of yarn, but we didn’t bother. We just held the loose end against the paint stick and wrapped over it to secure in place.
The kids wrapped and wrapped, covering up the paint stick with their yarn. When they finished with a colour, they snipped it with the scissors and used a bit of glue to hold it in place on the backside of their Santa.
When they’d wrapped enough that Santa’s suit, boots, belt and hat were complete, they glued a pom pom to the top of Santa’s hat. They finished with some googly eyes and a craft jewel for Santa’s belt buckle. If there was enough of Santa’s face peeking through from behind his beard, they glued on a little red craft jewel for a “cherry nose”.
Aren’t they adorable?
Now the kids can play with their paint stick Santas or glue a loop of yarn to the top, and hang him on the Christmas tree!
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Craft Stick Santa, Elf and Reindeer
Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
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