Chaos writes:
So… what does one do with cereal boxes, if you can’t bear to stick them in the recycling, how about cooking up some cute little Papier–mâché seedling pots.
We ripped the cardboard cereal boxes and rice cake boxes into small pieces, and gave them a good soaking. Then pulped the pieces with water, in the blender (sssh, don’t tell Daddy).
Draining the pulp in a colander, squeezing the excess water. Flour the work surface, and mix, knead in some flour {SECRET INGREDIENT ALERT!}.
And take small quantities, pushing into the silicone muffin cases to mold the little pots. We air-dried the pots over-night, however, for speed, you could pop them into the oven, if you were baking spuds, or home-made pizza anyway!
We DID try to make a batch of these seedling pots in conventional metal cake trays… FAIL!, they set solid, glued in… so yes, silicone rules!
First Published April 12 2013.
Updated September 2024 to include a link to a recent post from incredibusy about paper clay… here
Click this image below to watch the youtube video of our Google+ hangout – and watch Maggy from Red Ted Art sharing her shadow puppet theatre and her ‘everlasting’ picture frame, Playful Learners made another gorgeous puppet theatre Aly at Plus 2 Point 4 showed us how to use a box as a weaving loom, and my fave, Me and My Shadow and her vintage style secret book…
To read more on our gardening adventures click here to see where we got our delicious compost for our seedlings.
To see how our garden grows, follow our Gardening With Kids posts here.
and how to make an indoor watering can here!
Papier Mache Disaster Meteorite
Papier Mache Disaster Meteorite
So, we decided to make some Papier-mâché hot air balloons… that’s how it started out, all good intentions.
So 7yo being the possibly more crafty of the two (yep, the 5yo is crafty in other ways, say no more) got stuck right in….
1) We made the glue: mixed one cup of flour, and two cups of water, and a teaspoon of cinammon (that way it smells nice too)
2) We ripped the newspaper into strips
3) 7yo took off his brand new hoodie as he didn’t want to get it mucky
4) We pulled each strip through the ‘glue’ and let it drip back into the bowl (AND all over the garden too, much to SAHD’s delight)
5) We layered and layered until the balloon (Oh, I didn’t mention that bit did I? – blow up a balloon, and balance it on a bowl to stop it blowing or rolling away) was covered in paper mache.
Then we had to leave it to dry for a day (which is where 5yo lost interest, so I’d say stick with one layer if you’re not bothered about keeping the masterpiece for ever!)
We learnt an important lesson here, on Day 2 when we went back to add another layer, 7yo’s balloon had shrivelled, but we layered on some more paper mache…. MISTAKE, with no balloon inside to hold it’s shape this happened…
Not to be out-witted by the wilted balloon, 7yo spun it round (phew, was waiting for a tantrum) and said he would make it into a meteorite – which is what he did! Job done…
Thanks to Maggy at RedTedArt for continuing to encourage us to ‘get crafty!’
For a more successful foray into papermache check out our post here on Paper mache seed pots – using the blender! and using pulp from cereal boxes … this time it worked!