Crafty ideas for toddlers - Wool Winding Pictures

Mr Maker is a popular man among the three-year-olds in my family.  

To me he's a little over-the-top.  I really don't like the way that he cuts shapes out of the middle of a piece of paper and wastes the rest of the paper.  I spent years as a Primary School Teacher telling children that they should cut from the edge so that as much of the paper as possible can be used for something else.  He seems to require a lot of his resources to be bought, rather than following thrifty and environmentally sound principles of reusing things from around the house.  There aren't many items using bottle tops, egg boxes or old newspaper or loo-roll tubes for example.  Enough ranting - C loves his show on CBeebies.

Yesterday afternoon he decided that he wanted to cut a piece of cardboard.  I immediately made the connection to the wool picture that Mr Maker had made on the television in the morning, and produced the necessary resources.

We needed:

• pieces of cardboard cut from a cardboard box, about A4 size
• A4 coloured paper
• sharp scissors
• glue
• sticky tape
• oddments of coloured wool.

What to do:

• stick the coloured paper to the cardboard and trim so that they are both the same size.
• Use the scissors to cut little v-shaped notches around the edge of the card - as many or as few as you like, there should be at least one on each side.
• Fasten the end of a piece of wool to the back of the card with sticky-tape and start winding it around the card, feeding it through the notches.  The bit that C found tricky was keeping it tight enough rather than just looping it around loosely.
• When you reach the end of a piece of wool, fasten it on the back of the picture using more sticky tape, and fasten on your new piece of wool.  It looks good with two or three colours.
• I then cut the centre of another piece of A4 paper (I used a wavy line so that it wouldn't matter if not entirely central or straight!) and stuck this on as a frame (not shown).

C really enjoyed making something he'd seen on the television, and was proud of the result, though he did comment that "it was tricky and hard".