Surprise St Patricks Day Craft

Why St Patricks Day craft? I am not Irish. My husband is not Irish, but we ARE a multicultural family and we try to celebrate as many different nations' special days as possible. One of my favorite is St. Patrick's Day. I love how this day and it's symbols reflect Ireland's folklore, culture, and national identities. And of course...

Because it's Spring, it's Green and it's supposed to be Lucky

The minute I saw fresh clovers in my yard I decided it's time for our yearly St. Patrick's Day craft.

We wanted to make something fresh, cute and live. Just like these clovers from my yard.

St. Patrick's Day craft Tutorial

Supplies:

• Gather your supplies: 2 toilet paper rolls, some copy paper, tape, glue scissors, paint, brush and some cotton.

BODY:

• cut the 1 st toilet paper roll in half in height and make it slimmer, tape it together.
• cut the second roll in half (in width) and put it on the 1 st tall and skinny roll. Make sure there is enough space between them so the little roll can go up and down easily.
• cut little triangle on the skinny roll for the St. Patrick's pans.

FACE:

• Use the small roll to make the face.
• Color it.
• Use cotton to shape little balls to lay out the beard and little stripes for the eyebrows.
• Draw the eyes, nose and lips.

HAT:

• To make the hat for St. Patrick cut piece of paper (after you measure how much you need to cover the big body roll) in stripes, but just about 2/3 of the paper's height.
• Color it.
• Glue it on the big body roll with stripes down (don't glue the stripes).
• Fold up the stripes up.

 Color the pans, tape the shoes (made from the other half of the cut roll). St. Patrick is ready to go.

St. Patrick's Day craft "after party"

Meet St. Patrick

with the hat

Meet St. Patrick

without the hat

And now meet both of them

all you have to do is pull down and up

the head to get different St. Patricks.

This cute fella (nicknamed by my daughter) was the hit in our house for few days. Because of its different appearance she was inspired to role play storytelling where she put 2 characters in 1. Not to brag too much but I totally think that,  "The Hat is Missingggg" story could be turned into a book.

Where was my video camera then? It was not charged, of course.

Talking about books... We read a wonderful book called Discovery In The Woods: A St. Patrick's Day Surprise, which gave a lot of ideas and fun extra push for a lot of activities with this little St Patricks Day craft we did. There is some mystery and magic involved, so not only your kids will love, I am pretty sure you gonna love this book too.

We sure do enjoy the process of crafting. I just love those precious moments when the genius idea comes in my daughter's head and she forgets everything around her until she completes the craft. I adore how serious and motivated she gets during the hard parts of crafting and of course I would not trade for anything her face when she finishes and looks so proud and ... simply happy. Nobody can argue the benefits to kids when they craft.

But when the craft is done, most of the time it's over. The only thing is left - to put it somewhere it's supposed to be visible so everybody could glance and enjoy once in a while.

For this reason we try to come up with some crafts that could be played with later on. It's so much more fun this way. When my kids get to play with what they actually created it's a totally different world of imagination for them.

Here is couple other crafts we did with the intention to play with them later:

• Story telling activity that rocks with our famous Rocks in The Box.
• Egg carton Caterpillar craft where Butterfly comes out of the cocoon.
• Penguin craft with a baby penguin and Daddy penguin.

Check out more toilet paper roll crafts