Thursday, December 2, 2010

The 5-minute mama crafter

N. watched Frosty the Snowman for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Oh boy. She hasn't stopped talking about snowmen, Frosty, Santa Claus, "Karen," and Christmas in general. It doesn't help that every house in town has put their lights and decorations up (including us).

So yesterday we were killing time and playing before our bedtime routine, and she kept asking me for Frosty. So I decided to make her one with scrap materials we had around. It took us all of 5 minutes too! My favorite kind of baby craft.



Materials:
2 styrofoam balls (one small, one medium; or one medium, one large)
some red felt for the scarf
some black felt for the hat (which quickly got destroyed and thrown away by miss N.)
1 Toothpick
Chenille piper cleaners
Black and orange paper
Glue

How we did it:

I broke the toothpick into a smaller piece, so that I could stick each end of a different styrofoam ball. Then I cut the eyes and mouth out of black paper and glued it on the smaller ball (the face). Cute the red felt into a scarf and glued it where the two balls were connecting. I cut small pieces of the pipe cleaner and stuck them on the sides of the bigger ball for his arms. Then I took another piece of the toothpick and stuck it at the very corner of the mouth (for Frosty's pipe). I tried to imitate Frosty's button nose with black paper, but didn't like the results, so I decided to use a carrot nose (N. didn't notice). I cut a long and narrow piece of orange paper and rolled into a "nose" like you see above, took another piece of the toothpick and glued it to the inside of the orange nose and stuck it in the face (poor Frosty was stabbed a few times during this process...). Then I did something similar to the pipe (cut orange paper, glue the end of the pipe toothpick to the inside).

The hat... It took me the longest, cutting out round pieces of felt for the bottom and top of the hat, then a long one for the wrap around. It looked like a top hat... I glued it to Frosty's head but miss N. wouldn't wait until it dried (I should have used a hot glue gun, maybe?) and the thing got destroyed very, very quickly.

But I really like how it came out anyway, and so after she played with him he proudly went into our balustrade's pine needles among the lights and other things.

3 comments:

  1. that is brilliant. oh how I love quick and easy crafts. and he looks very professional.

    thanks for weighing in on the writing/digital idea, you are so right about it, nothing beats letters, I found a bunch of old floppy disks in my garage, they contain my college days work, what can I do with it? what computer could read old disks now? thank goodness I do have a paper copy of my thesis in my mother's house!! we need to write more down.

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  2. Thank you! Quick and easy works for me most of the time, though not all of them come out as cute looking as mr snowman above.

    And yes on the digital vs hard copy. Sometimes it's just good to have some of that hard stuff archived for the record.

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  3. Darling! I wonder if the hat could be made quickly of cardboard too? and maybe cut a bit from the top of his head so you have a flat surface to really glue it down good. Just my random thoughts! :) I love this idea and love your photos!

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