Pretty toilet paper roll butterflies!

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.

Easter bunny and chick have a little picnic! - #stayhomeandcraft

This is a gathering of some past toilet paper roll crafts and it makes a really sweet little display - perfect for storing pens and pencils, or a few Easter eggs!

You will need:
3 Toilet paper rolls (or use kitchen paper rolls)
Egg carton
Cereal box card
Plain paper
Paint
Craft glue (and a glue stick is useful too)
Scissors
Feather (optional)
Black pen
Yellow/orange tissue paper (optional)


1. Cut a piece of cereal box, about 12cm by 14cm (5in. x 51/2in.) and cut one cup from the egg carton.

2. Paint one of the tubes green, plus about halfway down the inside, and paint the plain side of the cereal box card.

3. While that's drying, gently press one of the other cones flattish, so it's easier to draw on - try not to crease the sides too much, and draw bunny ears. It helps if you draw a light pencil line down the middle of the cone first, then draw the ears either side. This keeps things even. Roughly half the tube should be bunny body and the rest, right up to the top, should be ears.

Continue the pencil line around the back - we curved ours down a little, then up to meet the other side, but straight is fine too.

4. When cutting out the middle of the ears, cut from the top down to the bottom of the ears on both sides, then fold out the flap of card and remove.

5. Cut down the other side of the ear, then cut down to the line a little further around the back of the tube, fold out and cut the flap off. Cut along the pencil line to the bottom of the other ear.

6. For the chick, flatten the last cone carefully again, and draw a curved line across, about a third of the way up the cone. Continue the line around the back. We curved this down a little, like the bunny, but straight is fine too.

7. Paint the chick, egg carton cup and some spare card (for the basket handle) yellow, and paint your bunny grey (or any other colour you like!)

8. While they're drying, Cut zigzags into you green cone. Make them different widths and lengths. On one side make the grass shorter, so you can see longer strands behind. This adds to the 3D effect.

9. Make some little flowers and insects to add to your grass.  The daisies are thin strips of white paper crossed over each other and glued together with a yellow centre (either paint or draw this on, or use a hole puncher to make a little yellow circle. The butterfly and ladybird and made from cereal box card. There is a more detailed tutorial for this meadow scene HERE.

10. To finish the bunny, either paint the inside of the ears pink, or fold a small piece of paper in half and draw a petal shape that's smaller than your bunny's ears. Cut out so you end up with two identical pieces. If you don't have pink paper, colour in some plain paper.

Glue these in place ( a glue stick is the easiest and least messy way to do this)

For the bunny's tummy, fold a small piece of plain paper in half and draw half an oval shape on the fold. Cut out and open up. Glue near the bottom of your cone.

Use a black pen to draw on eyes, nose and whiskers. Keep the eyes close to the bottom of the ears. Add a cotton wool tail on the back if you like.

11. For the chick, draw eyes with a black pen near the top of the curve, and glue a small orange triangle between them. (You could paint or draw the beak on instead)

If you have any feathers, glue one behind the top of the head.

12. The little basket is based on the nests for happy hens in my book, 'Make Your Own Farm Animals'. There's a link to Amazon here if you'd like to see it.

If you don't have tissue paper, or want a more speedy option, just cut a strip from the yellow card thats a good size for a handle, and glue the ends inside the egg carton cup. Use some paper clips to hold this in place while the glue dries.

If you want to use tissue paper, loosely fold a few sheets of yellow and orange over several times, and cut across, keeping the strips really thin. When you feel you have enough, unfurl and pull the strands apart, then scrunch and rip them up a bit.

13. Brush some glue inside the egg cup and press a good amount of your ripped up tissue paper strands into the glue. Fun and messy! Keep pressing the tissue paper around the inside until it moulds to the shape of the cup, and most of the strands are glued down. Do the same on the outside, pressing and squeezing the cup until the tissue paper looks quite flat. Cut off any fly-away bits.

14. For the handle, glue and press another handful of strands onto the yellow painted card. Press as flat as you can.

Then cut a strip from the middle - shape and size it for the basket, and glue the ends inside. Use paper clips or something similar to hold the ends in place while the glue dries.

15. Assemble all your pieces on the card and glue in place.

To make the base more sturdy, you could glue to a thicker piece of cardboard.

 Now it's ready for pens or chocolate eggs! (know what I'd choose..)