Saturday, April 19, 2014

Bunny Ears and a Kiwi Crate Update


So the hubby was gone for the three weeks leading up to Easter. Luckily I'm a planner and already had all my Easter and Easter basket fillers before he left so I didn't have to try and buy them when the boys were with me. One of our pre-Easter activities was an Egg Hunt for a play group we are apart of. I volunteered to organize the craft and came up with a super easy bunny ears craft for the Littles to do. This craft was great because I preassembled everything so that the day of the Egg Hunt there was very little for the kids / moms to have to do, but they got a really cute craft out of it.

I'm all about shortcuts and making things easier, not harder. So I freehand just drew an outline of the bunny ears. The larger one was for the outer white part of the ear and the smaller was for the inner pink part of the ear.

After making the template I traced it onto the pink and white papers and cut them out. Here's a couple tips for cutting things out when you need to cut multiples... when it's small enough fold the paper in half (which is what I did for the pink papers). This way you trace and cut less. Because the white part was bigger I could only fit three ears to a page and couldn't fold in half so I stapled the edges to keep the paper from shifting when I was cutting. I didn't need to staple the pink paper because when it is folded it will stay together when you cut it. I had to make fifteen sets so I needed 30 of each piece. With the pink I just folded all the paper together so I just had to make 5 cuts and I had all 3 pieces. Be careful about trying to cut too much at once. I could cut through about 6 pieces of paper. If you try to cut too much your cuts will get messy and your scissors won't be able to cut through it all.

The next step is to glue the pink center to the white outer ear. I used a glue stick to glue it because liquid glue will make it wrinkly and the glue stick will keep it smooth.

After that I glued the ears to the headband piece. Because I'm a former teacher I used a bunch of old sentence strips that I still had. I did use liquid glue for this step because it has a stronger hold and I didn't want the ears falling off. I just put a little at the bottom of the backside of the ear and stuck it on to the sentence strip. If you don't have sentence strips you can take a piece of construction paper, fold it horizontally or "hot dog" (so it's longer). Then cut along the fold. Staple or glue the ends of one side of each strip together to make a long band.

Then I just laid them all out to dry flat. The next step is what we did at our playgroup outing. Using the liquid glue I did a thin line through the middle of the exposed white part of the ear. Then I took cotton balls and stuck them in the glue. I pulled my cotton balls apart to spread them out and use less cotton balls. But you can just grab them and stick them too. I did one ear at a time so the glue didn't dry before I got them cotton balls stuck on. I don't recommend using a glue stick for the part. The cotton balls might stick at first but the glue won't old as log and they'll be falling off before you know it.




Now the only step left is to wrap around child's head to fit the band and then staple to hold the ends together. I don't recommend stapling while band is near child's head.

Now depending on how big kiddos head is, you may need some reinforcement on the back to keep the ears sticking up. You can use Popsicle sticks or straws. I just so happened to have straws at hand so I cut one straw in half and taped it to the ears.

Thing 1 didn't want anything to do with making ears at the Egg Hunt so he let me use his as an example for everyone else.

As you can see he was less than thrilled to be wearing the bunny ears!

Here are a few photos from the Egg Hunt! Here's our craft table all set up and ready to go!


Look at this Little! Isn't he just the most adorable thing ever?!


This is my friend who's the mom of the two twin Littles pictured in the bunny ears since my own Things were so uncooperative! Aren't they just the cutest? She's the super mom who coordinated the egg hunt for the play group!

Here's her other Little He's just a ham for the camera!


Now I have to be honest... if it wasn't for Thing 3 taking the longest nap ever and Thing 1 and 2 being distracted by a Kiwi Crate activity I don't know how I would have gotten this done. So here's the other project that came with our last Kiwi crate with the plants theme.

It was super easy and the boys could pretty much do it unassisted. First they had to color the flowers and plants. Then they punched them out and stuck them on pipe cleaners. After that they decorated the pots with modeling clay, put a little modeling clay in the bottom of the pot and stuck the pipe cleaners in the modeling clay in the pot.Super easy and fun and it kept them busy!


Thing 1's pots

 Thing 2's pots

 We made a garden!

And it was only fitting that we put our flower pots with our window garden. Can you believe how much these seeds have grown in two and a half weeks!? I love that every time I'm at the sink I get to see all this!

Thing 1's plants

Thing 2's plants

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