DIY Crafts for Kids Using Household Objects
Looking for a fun and kid-friendly craft project for a rainy day? While it’s tempting to curl up with a laptop or fire up Netflix on a day off, crafts are another fun way to get the creative juices flowing. For readers that have children or enjoy doing crafts themselves, here are a few creative and crafty ideas that use everyday items that can be found right in your home. No special tools or skills required!
K-Cup Seed Starters
Coffee lovers who have a Keurig machine in their home know how wasteful the K-Cups can be once they are emptied. Unfortunately, they are very difficult to properly recycle and are, therefore, often thrown directly into the general waste bin. Thankfully, you can start using these cups in your crafts on projects that can help the environment. One common way to use them is as seed starters. Simply fill them with a little soil and plant your minute seeds and watch them grow. If you want, you can even put two holes on the top part of the cup on either side, put a string through the holes and hang them in the appropriate environment. Egg cartons are also useful as seed starters.
Creative Uses for Wine Corks
Wine lovers are likely to have plenty of corks lying around. If not, start saving them and planning ahead to use on your next craft. A fun and easy project involves getting paint, dipping one of the circular ends into it and making a circle on a clean piece of paper. From here you can add on legs and ears to the circular shape making your own duck, frog, pig, bunny, turtle or any other animal you can imagine. Another idea is to use the cork itself and make your own personal pocket puppets. This will take a bit more time and attention to detail but it can make for hours of entertainment later. These puppets can be anything from superheroes to animals. Just use the cork as the body of the puppet and add on a creative outfit and face with felt, colored paper, glue, pom-poms and whatever else you might have lying around.
CD Coasters
Anyone who grew up collecting CDs and DVDs is sure to have a collection lying around gathering dust. Well, now you can pull them out and start upcycling them while having fun in the process. One common craft that might be geared more towards adults is using them as coasters. For this, you need to sand down the CD/DVD, paint it your desired color, stencil or draw a design, matte varnish it once dry and glue felt on the back so it won’t slide around.
Children might enjoy making their own suncatchers. The most important part of this project though is to make sure you have newspaper covering the craft area as things are bound to get messy very quickly. All you need for this is glue and anything sparkly or shiny such as beads, sequins or glitter, and then cover the disks as desired. Once they are dry, you can hang them from trees with fishing line and watch the sun catch the sparkles.
Fun With Shoe Boxes
Don’t underestimate the usefulness of shoe boxes. While they are great for storing things under the bed, there are many other creative solutions that they can be used for such as for making a dollhouse, movie projector, train or treasure chest. All you need is a little imagination and plenty of glue, colored paper, crayons and scissors. Ask your child and see if they have any ideas of what they want to create. This will get everyone excited about participating rather than it being like a chore for them.
Toilet Paper Roll Animals
Once the toilet paper is gone, don’t throw away the roll. Use them to make animals or characters, similar to that of the wine cork puppets. Because rolls are much larger than corks, you can use googly eyes and have a bit more room to play around with. These rolls can also be used to create honeycomb wreaths, calendars, paper flowers and bird feeders.
