Shelly and her children create some beautiful flower collages using templates from Activity Village in this guest blog post.
Making Flower Collages
By Shelly
We love creating collages. Ever since the kids were little we would select a bunch of items out of the cupboard a basic colouring sheet or template and the kids would create whatever they wanted. It has always been an easy and fun crafting activity for the kids.
We still like making collages only now the kids like to use them in something else – a birthday card, a larger picture or to decorate an item.
An easy flower craft activity
With the lovely weather we have been having we thought it might be fun to create a few flower collages. The kids choose two templates – a sunflower and a daffodil and I printed out a number of copies of each. For our purposes we reduced the size of the flowers when we printed them – so I printed two to a page.
We cut out the flowers. We have found it easier to cut out the shapes before we start adding the extra bits and pieces just because it can be tricky to cut them out once the kids have finished decorating them. The kids chose some items to use – tissue paper, shredded paper, some different size coloured buttons and their puffy paint.
My kids love using the puffy paint (you can buy some tubes at most crafting stores) and I encourage it because the squeezing of the plastic bottles is really a great hand strengthening activity. But I must mention if you are new to the joys of puffy paint - be warned they need time to dry and still drying they are very easy to smudge! Also if the kids get any on their clothes, rinse quickly to make sure you get it out.
Creating puffy paint flowers
Close up of a finished puffy paint flower
The kids made a number of different versions of the flowers. My son even added some crafting pom-poms to a few.
Some of our flower collages
I really liked the flowers where they combined materials – buttons combined with scrunched up tissue paper were my favourites. If you have not used tissue paper before we recommend you apply the glue to the template and then add the tissue paper. If you try and add glue directly to the tissue paper it gets very messy and the tissue paper gets a bit mangled.
Creating a flower collage with scrunched up tissue paper. You can see the finished flower in the photo one above.
Here are our end results. My daughter made this cheerful card for a friend.
Flower collage card
We also used a few of the flowers to liven up some of our notice boards.
Using our flowers to decorate a notice board
And if you want to use them to make a cheerful picture, you can always add some craft sticks (lolly sticks) as their stems.
Puffy paint flowers with craft stick stems
Puffy paint and collage flowers with craft stick stems
I always find collages an easy crafting activity. Material-wise, the kids can use whatever you have at hand – wool, bits of ribbon or cut off fabrics can be very effective. Also pasta, rice or dried beans work really well. If you are feeling really crafting you could always dye the rice before hand – just make sure you let the dyed rice dry properly overnight.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
