In love with recycled craft



 

He was all packed and ready to visit his Grandma and of course, celebrate Chinese New Year in Malaysia.  Papa planned a 20 days trip which 16 days would be spent in his hometown Kedah and the next 4 days at Parkroyal Penang Resort (which I would post later). Unexpected to be such a long holiday but a nice break for everybody :)  Prior to departure, I told him he could bring two of his favourite solid toys, stuffed toys and storybooks.  And these were what he carried in his backpack :-

 

1. Stuffed toys - a giraffe and a chameleon which he called them 'zoobie' and 'chamee'

2. Toys - dinosaurs; a parasurolophus and an utahraptor

3. Storybooks - English book titled "Where in the world are we?" and Chinese book titled "谁

会生蛋?"

 

On top of which, I packed a box of dinosuar fossil kit into our check-in luggage which actually kept him occupied for few days.  Reason being, there was no kids to play with at Grandma's house and certainly, no toys like he had back home.  Whilst his teacher has also given us some letter writing and activity worksheets to do as well as informed me of the topics/subjects they would be discussing and/or doing during his absence, these were completed fairly quickly in the morning without stress over a period of time. 

 

Boredom soon consumed my little one before Chinese New Year.  And I began to search for ideas in the internet on how to make toys out of toilet rolls, cardboard box and 'angbo' packet paper which were the only resources available for us. My son got really excited about it.  And together we designed and created these holiday's projects.  He enjoyed the fruit of his labour very much.  However, my boy did not like giving these cars a new coat of paint because I insisted two layers; first a white base and the second layer, solid colour.  He was impatient and gave up halfway through painting our second project - cardboard box car Lightning the McQueen. So the third and fourth projects; plane and fish, were absolutely no painting!  

 

Here are some of links that inspired me to start the creation.

 

Toilet roll race car

Crescent and Old Lace has gorgeous and colourful race cars that made with toilet rolls.  It's in hungarian but google can translate. Slight variation from the original. I used aluminium foil (those that found in the kitchen) and white paper for the rim of the wheels.  We cut out the small details like the numbers, orange stripes and mazda logo from a magazine and glued on the car.

 

1st project - toilet roll race car

Cardboard box car

I made reference to the Green Acres Hobby Farm for the look and make of Lightning the McQueen. My big boy definitely could not sit inside the cardboard given his height and weight :P  So I modified and used raffia string attached on the side of box to hang over my son's shoulder.  Check it out, it has light blue eyes just like McQueen! Honestly, only the body and four wheels were painted with poster colours. I became lazy and used colour papers to cut out the shapes for the rest of the details. Aluminium foil really come in handy here because it was perfect on the front and rear lights.  The downside was after racing with his new toy car for hours, his sweaty palms were stained with red colour ;P

 

2nd project - Cardboard box Lightning the McQueen

New Toy!

Toilet roll vintage plane
I love the detailed tutorial by Home-eco nanay for this vintage plane.  This was the only craft that did not involve my boy.  It was too difficult for my son to handle.  However, the only request from my boy was "no colours, nothing!".  But I had fun making it.

3rd project - Toilet roll Aeroplane

Red paper (packet) fish  

I first saw it in Mamamie's Thots by one of SMB blogger. It was a common decorative in Chinese household during the Lunar New Year festive season. We made a couples of gold and red fishes.  Really simple and easy craft!  But the challenging part for my boy was to staple the tail though.

 

 

4th project - Red/gold paper fish