HOLY CRAP! Here’s finally something to do with all those overabundance of amazon boxes in your recycling bin. Easy Cardboard Crafts to the rescue! This is something you can do at your house and probably don’t need to buy anything. Actually the fact that you bought something on amazon gives you the materials you need! Check out these adorable animals from Maggy at Red Ted Art!
Cardboard Can Become Anything & Everything
You can create so many cool things with this idea. Create a zoo in your backyard, create a safari for your neighbor kids to ride their bikes through.
The sky’s the limit on this one.
I absolutely CANNOT wait to do this with my camp kids! Grab your cardboard and scissors, paint and whatever else you have laying around and GO FOR IT!
First, grab your empty TP rolls. You know, the TP you hoarded during COVID. Don’t lie, you know you did. I know I did. LOL
Anyways, grab some rolls and get to decorating! There are sooooo many cool things you can do with them artistically.
- Color or paint them and cut them into links to make a garland or a countdown calendar for an event they are excited to participate in.
- Turn them into a castle! Graba a cardboard box and add the rolls for the towers! See how elaborate a castle they can make from only recycled cardboard
- Make people with your rolls. All kinds of people, professions, maybe even animals.
On her website Maggie showed a picture of 5 cardboard Creations that she made with her kiddos. She said they started out as men and women and one of them turned into a robber and an old lady turned into a pirate and eventually the cat lost one of his eyes.
But it’s still super cute and shows the level of creativity your kids can show off. I love the idea of letting them use fabric scraps left / scrapbook paper. The googly eyes are an obvious must! But I just love seeing the different levels of creativity that some of our kids come up with.
Thinking of cardboard creativity, check out these cardboard tube ninjas! I mean how much cuter they could get these? Pipe cleaners, googly eyes, black paper or paint and a little square of peach paper and you are all set. This looks like the beginning of an epic ninja battle. You could have kids using different colors for their ninjas and have some form of a competition between them. I can really see the creativity not just in the creation of these cardboard tube characters but in what you do with them after they’ve been created.
Maybe cardboard ninjas aren’t your thing? But maybe monsters are! I cannot get enough of how cute these monsters are in this picture. Talk about getting really creative with your work! For some reason these guys are giving me a very demented carnival vibe and I’m totally down for it. it wouldn’t surprise me if these monsters somehow caused an invasion at this artist house and the kids took over the kitchen or a bedroom and you were just inundated with all these crazy monster characters. I can just see it now!
What would it look like to create an entire cardboard art theme? Mermaids, water creatures, a coral reef, maybe even Atlantis. You could create an entire thematic landscaping with all of the accouterments! How exciting would this be for a cardboard box turned on its side to morph into an underwater Seascape. Your kids are going to flip over this activity! And really all you had to do is collect scraps of paper fabrics and other materials from what you probably already have in your overflowing box of art stuff.
But now let’s take it up a notch. Let’s talk large-scale. Let’s talk, “life size”. I cannot even begin to express how excited I am about the thought of making cardboard armor or cardboard animals on a life-size scale.
I love it when clearly we’re given free range to Mom and Dad’s recycling bin and probably an extensive collection of scissors and tape. I mean I’m just in all of the creativity that comes out of people as well as the idea behind their masks! I’m definitely going to be doing that at my friend’s 7 year old’s birthday party!
What an epic adventure that will be! Cardboard box humans running around. Definitely going to add some sparkles, pom poms, tin foil and so much more!
So here’s a list of the materials you’re probably going to need if you want to take on any of these cardboard art challenges!
So here’s a list of the materials you’re probably going to need if you want to take on any of these easy cardboard crafts!
* Cardboard. Leftover shipping boxes from Amazon or other online sales purchases, the leftover refrigerator box, washer dryer box or dishwasher box that the delivery people don’t feel like throwing away for you, any other cardstock or a cardboard that you can find laying around in your garage or your craft room.
* Heavy-duty scissors, box cutters and x-catos. I would be extremely cautious supervising the use of these materials because if you’re working with kids we definitely don’t want anybody harming themselves. I keep my box cutter is an x-acto blades hidden in a box where no one can find them and only bring them out when we’re going to use them. I teach the children about how to carry them how to store them in front of them when they’re not using them and how to return them safely
* Paper. Blank paper that children can color on or drawn, scrap of paper anything that you have left over from your scrapbooking days in the early 2000s. Newspapers magazines any kind of paper material that you have laying around that kids can use to decorate or wrap around the cardboard play
* Glue- Elmer’s glue stick glue and hot glue are my recommendations. Heavy-duty cardboard is going to need something more than white glue to schmeer between two pieces to keep it held together. So I definitely recommend hot glue guns. They make a low temp hot glue gun now that is less likely for the glue and the hot glue gun itself to burn you if you come into contact with it. I highly recommend replacing all your hot glue guns with low temp glue guns as soon as possible.
* Scraps of fabric. Let’s get a little bit extra with our creative activities by adding in some fabric. Making an old lady out of a toilet paper roll adding some funky floral pattern for a dress gives it just the right bit of “extra” a kid might be looking for. Also what superhero doesn’t want to have a really cool fabric cape attached to their backs?
* Googly eyes. – While not a requirement, googly eyes are the absolute bomb.com. If you ever come to my office to visit,my stapler has googly eyes on it, my tape dispenser has googly eyes on it, my monitor has googly eyes on it and my Cricut Joy maker has googly eyes the size of quarters on it. I LOVE them.
* Pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and more! – check around your craft stash supply and see what other items you could pull out like buttons, paper clips, brads, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks Etc. Any kind of embellishment that you could think of that they might think they want is definitely worthwhile. You might even have some of those plastic mini sword appetizer sticks that people use when they’re putting out food for a party.
* Tape– There’s so many different kinds of tape you could be using here. To name a few I would make sure you have some masking tape, some blue tape, some clear packing tape and possibly even different varieties of duct tape. Duct tape comes in all different colors and patterns these days and you definitely can’t go wrong having some of that on hand.
After that, you simply need to toss the participants all the supplies, give a couple of directions and sit back and enjoy the show. Kids could go for hours creating an entire world around all the cardboard materials that you save up for them. Don’t be afraid to put out a plug on your social media for other people to bring you there left over cardboard. I save so much cardboard and packing materials throughout the years so that I can use them in my art programs over the summer that my garage looks like a shipping facility blew up!