Printable: Pop-up Birdie

We have a robin's nest in our yard and the babies have just fledged. This is what inspired this pop-up chick in a nest.


The Printable:

Print it up on heavy card stock. Color and cut out all the pieces. Don't forget to cut along the dotted line in the nest for the bird to pop up through! Assemble by slipping the bird through the slit from under and behind the nest. Glue the little tab on the back on either side of the pop-up bird's pull tab so that it holds the tab straight but also so that the bird can still move up and down. Do not glue the bird piece at all, just the short tab to the back of the nest. You might also want to reinforce the bird's pull tab with a popsicle stick. Now pull and push the bottom of the stick to make your chick move!

Pipe Cleaner Rainbow

Whatever you call them- pipe cleaners, chenille stems- they are a great crafting material. They're fuzzy, they're bendy. You can twist them up and twist them together. You can use them for making animals, as stems on flowers (heck, I use them in the kitchen to clean out those nasty straws on sippy cups too.).

Yesterday, after way too much television, it was time to do something with our hands and creativity. Spiff and I decided we wanted to make a rainbow. But we're pretty bored with paper rainbows. Ah ha, I had just bought pipe cleaners for another project that very morning. Of course there were a rainbow of colors. But gluing them onto paper is pretty boring, and also pretty frustrating frankly. Pipe cleaners don't lend themselves much to the 2D or glue. But they do have nifty bending powers and they do have prickly ends just suited for sticking them into things. Like an egg carton. And, voila, our rainbow craft was born.


What You Need:

• Pipe cleaners in the colors of the rainbow
• an egg carton
• craft glue
• cotton balls
• an embroidery needle or pencil or paper clip end for poking.

What You Do:

1. Rip the top of your egg carton off so you just have the bumps. Cut the bumpy bottom of you egg carton down the middle the long way so you have a long row of 6 cups.
2. In each second cup in from the ends, poke a line of holes with your needle for each of your pipe cleaners. This is where we'll shove the ends through. So you'll have a hole for each end of each stem.
3. Bend the purple pipe cleaner into an arch, push one end through the innermost hole on each side. pull them ends so it'll be small enough to fit inside the next color. Do the same with blue in the neighboring holes, green in the next one, yellow in the next, orange, then red. Adjust the ends if you have to so they fit inside each other.
4. Now bend up the ends so they tuck nicely into the cup on the underside. Now you have your rainbow.
5. Let's make some clouds! (Because egg cartons are ugly.) Stretch several cotton balls so they're wispy and glue them all around and on top of the exposed egg carton.
6.  

And that's all there is to it!