Toilet paper roll Woodpecker that pecks!

We recently moved house and now live right next to a forest. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of a flash of red and green, darting about the trees. So that got me thinking about woodpeckers and possible woodpecker crafts. And then I thought, wouldn't it be great if the woodpecker could actually peck...?

In fact getting the bird to peck the kitchen paper roll tree is really simple - and it mightn't look like it, but the woodpecker itself is made from a toilet paper tube!


You will need:
Toilet paper tube (not too narrow. Ours had a diameter of about 5cm/2in.)
Pencil
Ruler
Paint
Green paper (or plain painted)
Black marker pen
Strip of cereal box card (3cmx16cm/1inx6in)
Kitchen paper roll
Nail scissors or similar (to be used by adult)

1. Apart from the green wings, all the woodpecker pieces come from the TP roll. Flatten the tube with you hand on a table or other surface, and press firmly along the creases.

With a pencil, roughy mark the middle at one end, and use a ruler or something straight to draw a line down the centre.

2. To help get the shape of the body, draw a line across the tube, roughly about 2cm from the top.

Now, start the curve of the head at the top edge, halfway between the vertical pencil line and the side of the tube (I've marked it with a short line in the photo below). Aim for where the pencil lines cross. Then curve the rest of the body downwards, towards the bottom corner.

Cut it out, carefully cutting along the line. This is the body shape.

We're now going to work on what's left of the tube, to make the tail feathers, head plume and beak.

I've kept them beside the body piece, so it's hopefully easier to see where they come from.

3. The tail feathers come from the top of the leftover piece, where you cut out the head. Keeping any pointy bits, cut diagonally across to the fold at a sharpish angle. So you end up with a narrow, pointy triangle.

4. The head plume comes from the bottom part. Simply cut along the pencil line.

You don't need double thick card, so only keep one of the pieces, and cut straight across it, about 3cm/1in from the edge. See the photo below.

5. At the very top of the body piece (on the RHS of the picture below), snip across the card diagonally, at a sharp angle, from where the curve for the head starts (the pencil mark), to the fold.
(You'll be snipping off a small triangle)

6. Now, just to check how everything looks together, and if you need to do any trimming. Slip the head plume in between the fold, with the shortest side inside, and the pointy part on show, facing to the back.

Push it down until the top of the head matches the width of the head plume. Place and hold the tail feathers inside the body at the bottom.

7. From what's left of the TP roll, cut a beak on the fold so it's double thick card. Make it a few cms long. Then glue it closed. Use a paper clip if you need to, to hold it firmly while the glue dries. The beak needs to be strong!

8. Before painting, open up the body piece and draw around the shape on some green paper (or plain that you can paint or colour in later). Cut out, then fold in half. We need to make it a little smaller for the wings. So, keeping the bottom curve as it is, and draw half a heart shape on top.

Cut out and when you open it up, you should get a long heart shape.

9. Time to paint. Paint the body white, both sides of the tail feathers yellow and both sides of the head plume red. Either paint the beak black or colour it in with a black marker or felt tip.

10. Cut out the strip of cereal box card (3cmx16cm/1in.x6in.) and it's time to assemble your woodpecker!

11. Brush glue inside the whole of the body. Then, working on one side, place the head plume in position at the top, the beak near the top of the head, then the strip of card about halfway down the body. Place the end right into the fold, so the strip is at a right angle with the back of the body.

Last of all add the tail feathers, which need to stick out at the bottom. Fold the other side of the body back into place so you're sandwiching all the pieces together. Glue the paper wings on too. If you've used craft glue as opposed to a glue gun, use paper clips or something similar to hold the card pieces together while the glue dries.

12. For the tree, flatten one end of a kitchen roll with your hand, so you make creases either side, and hold the strip of card across it, about a third of the way from the top. Use the strip edges to draw 2 parallel pencil lines across the tube.

13. Cut a slot along one of the creases, between the pencil lines. This needs to be done by a grown up. Nail scissors or something similar work well to make a hole in the card, then cut the slot. Do the same on the other side, but this time, make the slot about 2-3cm longer, above the top pencil line

Use the nail scissors to make lots of random holes in your tube.. This woodpecker has been busy!

Check the strip fits into the slots and position your woodpecker so the end of the beak touches the tube.

When you're happy with the bird's position, make a little pencil mark where the strip slots into the tube.

Take the strip out, draw a thick black line at an angle for the legs, and take the line a little past the pencil mark. We tried it with claws, but it looked a little strange with the movement so stuck with a line.

Add an eye and some feathery V marks on the wings.

The strip may move around a bit, but it's easy to reposition and wasn't a bother at all.

Sleepy Cat - made from toilet paper rolls!

Squashing toilet paper tubes to make different shapes opens up a whole new world of crafting possibilities! If you visit my blog regularly you'll know I'm forever flattening them to make a square shape..

These sleepy cats are no exception, and they're really not as tricky to make as you might think. It's all about the cutting and the folding. They are made in a similar way to our dog (called Scamp) and pig (called Oink!)

You will need

Toilet paper roll (ours was about 10cm long)
Small piece of spare card (from a cereal box or another TP roll)
Pencil
Ruler
Scissors
Craft glue
Paint
Sponge (optional)
Black pen.

1. Flatten the TP roll with your hand, then press firmly along the creases.

2.  Draw two lines across the flattened tube - each one should be about the same distance from the ends, and shorter than the section in the middle (which will be the cat's body)

(For our roll which was roughly 10cm long, we drew lines that were 3cm from each end and the middle part was 4cm. See the picture below).

3. Then lift the tube and line up the two creases, in the middle (see below), and once you're happy, flatten the tube again, pressing along the two new side creases. There should now be four, hopefully evenly spaced crease lines around the tube.

4. While it's still flat, continue the pencil lines across the tube - free-hand is fine, the lines are just there as a guide.

5. Cut down all the creases at both ends to the pencil line.  8 cuts altogether.

6. Fold and press back all the flaps, except for two at opposite ends. These flat pieces will be the bottom part of the cat (the outstretched legs).

7. At one end, cut the top flap off, carefully along the crease. This square-isn piece will be your cats head. Keep it somewhere safe.

8. To define the legs, cut a thin triangle shape in the middle of the flat, unfolded piece of card. Cut right up inside your cat's body. Do this at both ends and round off the paws if you want.

9. Now, at the head end (the one with no top flap), fold one of the side flaps right back against the side of the tube, press firmly along the crease again, then fold this flap in the middle (so, effectively in half) so the top edge of the flap lines up with the bottom part of the flap (the edge of the body), and press firmly along the folds.

10. Do the same on the other side, then push these folded flaps inwards, towards the tube.

11. They should come together well enough, like little doors, to seal off the front of your cat.

They will jut out a bit in the middle (see RHS of photo below), but this is what we want, because this is where the head will be attached later. No need to use any glue at this stage.


12. Do exactly the same to the flaps at the other end, but this time, before you push them inwards, into the tube, cut a slit up the middle of the top flap, right up to the fold (cut a sliver of card out, to make a slightly larger slot - this makes things easier)

As you can see ours isn't exactly in the middle! But it still works, it doesn't need to be perfect. Push this top flap down, to cover the hole, and then press the two side flaps into the slot.

Essentially it's like closing a little box! And it should hold together without glue.

13. Now for the tail - draw on some spare card (we used another tp roll, so both sides were easy to paint)

We made our tail quite curly and quite fiddly to cut out! So do go for a simpler shape if you prefer.

Make the tail extra long at the body end, so you can slot it into the back.

It should stay in position, but take it out again for painting.

14. Take the square of card you cut off earlier for the head, and cut a gentle curve along one side, to form the cat's ears.

15. Time to paint, and we used a sponge, which was fun and really quick! For our marmalade cat we squirted some yellow and a little red poster paint onto a sheet of newspaper (with an extra sheet underneath) and used the sponge to mix the colours and press the paint onto the cardboard pieces.  Using the sponge gives a lovely mottled effect.

Sponge both sides of the tail.

(might notice the newspaper's been recycled from the forget-me-not printing project!)

16. When the paint's dry, slot the tail back in (dab some glue on the end, if you feel it's a bit loose) and use a black pen (gel or thin marker pen) to draw on a face, plus claws on the front paws.

We added some tabby stripes to the face on the left with an orange Sharpie. You could draw stripes on the body too if you wanted.

Put a good blob of glue on the back of the head and attach to the top of the protruding flaps at the front. You could glue it so the head is facing forward, or glue the head angled to one side, as we did.

And here's my real sleepy cat!!

Bubble wrap flower printing for kids

It's fun finding things at home to print with, and bubble wrap has to be one of our favourites. We've used it before, to print cow parsley and wisteria - this time it's forget-me-nots (though it really could be any purply-blue wildflower).

I wanted to do forget-me-nots because they remind me of home. They appear all over our garden, in unexpected places, and always brighten things up.

Forget-me-not, forget-me-not
I'd say that's quite unlikely
since you spread your seeds like common weeds,
at least you're not unsightly..

In fact you bring a zing of spring to any garden nook
which is good news as clouds of blues are everywhere I look!

To make the stamps, cut out a circle of dots (7 dots altogether) and make sure you don't snip or puncture any of them, and glue to the bottom of a cork, or on top of a bottle lid would work too. Use strong glue like UHU or a glue gun if you've got one.

We also made a stamp with four bubble wrap dots, for a bit of variety.

You can of course print on plain paper, but we thought we'd brush on a green wash (using watered down green poster paint and a big brush)

For the flowers we put a good squirt of blue, white and purple paint on a plate.

Mix some of the colours together, but leave some unmixed too. Encourage kids to experiment with all the different colours and shades - dipping into the mixed colour and then dunking into some white or blue. This has a lovely effect, giving the flowers much more life and depth.

Try not to overload the stamps with paint or you'll end up with lots of blobs with no definition at all. To help avoid over-enthusiastic splodges, get kids to try their flower stamp on some newspaper first, which acts like a kind of blotter, before printing on the paper.

You could brush paint on the stamps instead too, but that's not going to be as much fun!

For the stalks, use the side of a coffee stirrer or popsicle stick. We mixed some blue into the green to make it darker, and as before, dipped the side of the stick into the mixed colour, as well as the plain colours, plus a little white too, which helps give the stalks more definition, as if they're catching the light. Get some white on the stick and press it along the side of a printed green line.

This is a simple way of achieving a more advanced effect, and it looks great.

For the leaves, we used half a potato and drew and cut out a simple small leaf shape.

If you want to add yellow centres, dot on some yellow paint using the end of your coffee stirrer, or popsicle stick.