This week, I’m focusing on St. Patrick’s Day projects. We aren’t Irish, but it gives me another theme to base some fun projects off of. Plus, my husband’s step-mom is Irish and we like doing fun little projects for her. In this project, we get to use paper, paint, glue and glitter!
First up, a cute little project I found on Pinterest. I didn’t get quite as detailed as the original, but mostly because we don’t have much time to complete these projects and also because I don’t want to spend a long of money on these crafts and her’s would have required me to buy some things.
I used:
- White cardstock cut into 6″x6″ squares
- Orange finger paint
- Green cardstock
- black felt
- Little kid hand prints
- Glitter glue
- Black marker
My kids get down-right giddy when I bust out the craft supplies and especially when I pull our finger paint! First, I showed them what we were going to make, by pulling up the pin on Pinterest. They were excited and I felt like it was easier to do the craft since they knew what they end result was going to be.
The original poster uses different colors of finger paint for the leprechaun’s body, but I knew that the kids weren’t going to be able to wait for me to mix the paint, so we decided just to go with one color…orange. I spread the paint on their hands, excluding their thumbs, and helped them press down on the paper to create their hand print.
My four-year-old wanted her fingers close together, which made it a little trickier. I also used too much paint on her hand, which was no big deal, except that it took longer to dry. I usually let paint dry for several days anyway just to avoid any potential mishaps.
One of the things my preschooler struggles with is cutting, so I know it’s something she needs to practice and it’s something I need to spend more time teaching me toddler before school starts for her. Building up those fine motor skills! While it’s really frustrating (for all of us) sometimes, I try to let them cut with every project. In this project, I drew the hats on green paper and armed them with scissors to cut them out. My toddler did a pretty good job. She sliced off the top of the hat and then asked for some help on the bottom portion, but at least she tried. My four-year-old made cutting errors three times before giving up. She’s a bit of a perfectionist and the hat did require some tiny details. I think in the future, I will try to stick to bigger shapes.
Once the hats were cut, we carefully glued them onto the bottom of the hand prints. We then cut small strips from black felt and glued them onto the hats. Using a glitter glue pen, we drew in a square to represent a buckle.
Once the paint was dry, we used a black marker to draw on a smiley face! Later this week, we plan to mail them to grandma with some other St. Patrick’s Day treats!
Stay tuned all week for tasty trees, wearables and other fun projects as we prepare for St. Patrick’s Day!
Want to see what other St. Patrick’s Day crafts I completed? Check them out in my St. Patrick’s Day mini-series.