I love butterfly crafts, and this is a very straightforward one. A great excuse to use lots of bright colours too!
You will need:
Toilet paper rolls
Paints (we used bottles of poster paints)
Scissors
Pencil
Pipe cleaner
1. Paint your tubes first. To get a really nice mix of bright colours, put two or three blobs of colours that work well together on different plates (ones that don't make sludgy brown when mixed!).
Like yellow and red, blue and white, or blue and yellow, green and yellow, yellow and pink, or blue, pink and white. White added to any of these colour combos looks great. We had some ready mixed purple too, which looked lovely with the pink and the blue.
This is a great way for kids to experiment with colour mixing, using a simple palette of complementary colours. Give them a big brush to paint with (we often use a pastry brush) - this helps with the mixing and with speed.. and then let them loose!
We painted the inside of the tubes as well, but you really don't need to. Works just as well without.
Mixing up the complementary colours gives a lovely marbly or sort of tie-dye effect. But if you wanted to do stripes of colours instead, or add some dots, that's totally up to you!
2. When the paint is dry, flatten a tube with your hand and press along the creases, so it's easier to draw on.
3. Use a pencil to mark the outline of your butterfly - for the butterfly body, mark about 3cm/1in along the crease, on the left-hand-side. To get the proportions of the top and bottom wings right, we drew this body line a little closer to the bottom of the tube than the top.
(As a guide, our TP roll was about 10cm, the body line starts 4cm from the top of the tube, and finishes roughly 3cm from the bottom of the tube.
Draw a curved line from the top of the body line to the top right-hand corner.
Make a pencil mark halfway down the body line on the LHS.
Draw a straight line from the right-hand edge towards this mark, but leave a gap (of about 2cm).
From the end of this line in the centre of the tube, draw a big curve down to the bottom right-hand corner.
Then, from the bottom of the body line on the LHS, draw another sweeping curve towards the same corner, but for fuller bottom wings, don't take this line right to the corner, stop a little before. See photo below.
4. Cut out your butterfly, cutting through the doubled-over card. With the middle section, it's easier if you cut along the straight line first, then cut along the curve below, starting at the bottom right-hand corner.
5. Cut away a little sliver of the top wing crease. Cut it at a slight angle. See below.
Don't cut off too much!
6. Open up your butterfly. The natural curve of the tube makes a lovely shape.
7. Bend a pipe-cleaner in half and hook it around the middle of your butterfly.
Twist the two pieces together to fasten, then wrap one tightly around the other, to make a head.
When you're happy, decide how long you want the antennae to be and trim the pipe-cleaners, allowing a little extra if you want to bend over the pointy tips so they're not so sharp. Bend into shape.
8. We made so many butterflies we needed somewhere to put them! So we painted some old cardboard packaging brown (you could leave it its natural colour) and cut out a tree trunk and some branches.
We glued them all onto some brown wrapping paper with pva craft glue. But didn't stick down the very ends of the branches, so they stuck out a bit.
Then attach a paper clip to the pipe-cleaner on the underside of a butterfly and clip this onto the end of a branch.
If you don't want to be able to remove them, you could of course glue the butterflies onto the tree.
