Pot of Gold Rainbow

We go to a lot of birthday parties and use a lot of gift bags. This means we also have a lot of tissue paper. I happened to check and we had all the colors for a rainbow. My kid loves rainbows and tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day so I could not resist. We made a Rainbow with a Pot of Gold at the end. It was definitely a parent-assisted endeavor with all the cutting involved but there was plenty for little fingers to do- glue, glue, glue and even some fun stretching and crumpling which my toddler was more than happy to assist my preschooler in.

What You Need:

tissue paper in rainbow colors, cut into long strips 1" wide.
white cardstock
cotton balls
string, cut about double the length of the tissue strips
gluestick
tape
scissors
hole punch



What You Do:

Cut your cloud out of the white cardstock. Ours was the full 8.5 inches wide so all 7 strips of color could sit nicely in a row along it. Take your glue stick and glue a line along the back of your cloud. Put the ends of the tissue strips on this line, one by one, right along. Do it backwards- purple (or "violent" as my kid calls it) to red so when you turn it over it's in the right order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.). Pat, pat, pat.

Turn it back over. Cover the front of the cloud with more glue and stick cotton balls all over it, stretching them out a little to make them more, I don't know, wispy and cloud-like. Voila, rainbow and cloud. You can stop here, or you can add your pot of gold:

We folded a scrap of cardstock in half and cut out a pot shape, then colored one side of each black. Then we crumpled up orange tissue paper and stuck it on the blank back of one along with one end of the string. Then we glued the other side of the pot on top of that for a tissue sandwich, having both black sides facing out.

Hole punch the top of your cloud. String the other end of the string through that, leaving enough to tie a loop for hanging. Knot it and tie that loop.

Hang it up in a window.