recyclables Archives - Lulu & Celeste

**This post was originally published in March 2013 and updated April 17, 2016**

I don’t know about you, but I’m always trying to find crafts that my kiddos can do on their own or at least with minimal help from me. And cheap! I’m all for recycled crafts partly because the supplies are free!

I first did these egg carton flowers with my oldest shortly after she turned 3. This is a fun and fairly easy craft for toddlers and preschoolers to do.

It’s not really a craft that needs much explanation but I decided to put together this post anyway to keep it as a reminder for a last minute craft idea.

CRAFT: EGG CARTON FLOWERS

Supplies:

Cardboard egg cartons
pipecleaners
paint and paintbrushes
scissors

Step 1: Cut the cups from egg cartons

Depending on the age of your child and their scissor skills you may need to cut the cups out yourself. We cut up two cartons but you can do as many or as few as you like!

Step 2: Paint the cups!

We used some watercolour paints that we had on hand and only painted the inside as they were starting to get a little soggy.

Next time I would probably use a thicker paint, like tempera. We used watercolours because those were the only ones we had on hand that were in bright spring-like colours as the tempera we had at the time are only in primary colours.

Egg carton flowers in the process of being painted Step 3: Assemble into flowers

Since we had to wait for them to dry completely this became a two day project.

If you like, cut the cups into flower-like shapes creating petals. Poke holes in the center of each flower and thread the pipe cleaners through. Bend one end of the pipe cleaners to prevent them from slipping back through the holes.

You can twist the “stems” together a bit so the bouquet stays put or wrap another pipecleaner around the stems to hold the bouquet together.

Finished flowers! Assembled into vases.

Place flowers in a vase and voilà! Pretty decorations ready for Easter (or Spring or in my daughter’s case her room) or even give them as a Mother’s Day gift!

Verdict: ***/4

I was way more hands-on for this project than I would normally have liked. Normally I prefer to be as hands off as possible when it comes to art and crafts activities with kids (I like seeing what they come up with on their own rather than them simply copying what I make), but she had asked me to paint with her so I painted some too. Also she only just turned three and the holes I made for the pipe cleaners were too small for her to thread by herself. And I had to do all the cutting (she can use scissors, but if I had left her to it, the flowers would have been a mound of tiny pieces of painted carton, lol). BUT I think this is definitely something we will do again, just maybe when she’s a bit older (like next year).

I did paint some of the flowers, but I think if I had left her to do it alone she would have lost interest as she wanted me to craft with her. She loved the end result though, and was proud to show daddy when he came home, and her grammie when she came by. She also kept telling me to smell the flowers. The vases are now on a shelf in her room. (Her daddy was actually doubtful about how they would turn out after he saw the painted cups the first day, the next day, once assembled into bouquets he thought they were pretty nice!)

Cost: $0

The vase on the left was left behind by the previous owners of our house (which we bought last June). The ‘vase’ on the right was one of the ‘vases’ I used for the table centerpieces at our wedding in 2011. (Painted jars, this one was a salsa jar, I only kept a few of them, the rest got recycled). The pipe cleaners I purchased back in highschool (like 20 years ago!)… (I hang onto to things for a while. I have a hard time getting rid of things that might be useful someday, lol.) The paint we used was a Christmas gift for Silly Bean from one of her aunties, and of course the egg cartons were saved from the recycling bin!