Saturday, November 28, 2009

Paper Ornaments

I wanted a craft project to do with the girls on Wednesday while they were out of school And, I really didn't want to make another pony bead jewelry piece, or construction paper, crayon melting kid craft. I wanted a real grown up craft that we would acutally use and all enjoy. So, we came up with these paper ornaments to hang from the chandelier.

Supplies:
Scrapbook or wrapping paper
Scissors or Rotary Cutter (just faster)
Stapler
Ruler

I used my rotary cutter to cut the scrapbook paper into strips 1" wide. Then, I marked lines on the strips and let the girls use their scissors to cut them to the following lengths. 6", 7", 9", and 11".

Then, the girls gathered 2 strips each of the longest pieces and 1 strip 6" long. Stack them together with the shortest one in the middle, so that your stack is like this 11, 9, 7, 6, 7, 9, 11. Line up all the strips at one end and staple it together.

Then, gather them up so that the opposite ends all line up. The paper will just start to stick out on its own as you go. Abby needed a little bit of help to get the concept of how it was supposed to work, but once I showed her, she was able to do it on her own.

Just staple the other side once you have all the ends matched up and you are done. We tied strings through them so we could hang them from the chandelier in the dining room. I had been wanting to decorate it for Christmas but didn't want to use just plain garland. I thought these turned out really cute.

You can vary the lengths of the paper strips to make pretty much any size ornament you want. We used the scraps to make the smaller on in the center.

1 comment:

SC FarmWife said...

Love this idea. I made a few myself just to try it. Will post pictures on blog later! Thanks!