If you know me, you know that I love Family Fun, the magazine and the web site. It is the source of many of my ideas... of course that makes them not MY ideas. Today we tried out a craft idea from the latest issue of the magazine, the Paper Bag Nest. It's pretty simple. Gather a handful of twigs from the yard and break them into small pieces. Then squash the sides of a brown paper lunch bag. Pour a small puddle of tacky glue onto a paper plate, then dip each twig into the glue and stick it to the bag.
My girls enjoyed looking around the yard and gathering small twigs. Not a hard task in our yard and they gathered much more than we needed. We squashed our bags and began to glue... but I had regular Elmer's glue, and really not enough of it either. This made the project a little more difficult because Elmer's is not as thick a glue, and I really needed more than I had. So my 6-year-old became a bit frustrated with the project as her twigs were not co-operating with her.
After we finished putting on the twigs, we added some dried leaves that were still hanging around our yard, breaking them up and sticking them in between the twigs here and there to add fullness.
All in all, we enjoyed building our nests and talking about how birds go about making nests for themselves and the different materials they find to make them. And we learned that you really should have tacky glue for this project.
I am glad you reviewed this craft. Daniel actually found it in the magazine and pointed it out to me! I wonder if Mod Podge would work?
ReplyDeleteIf it's thicker than Elmers, it might work. I think that's what part of the problem with the Elmers was that it was thin and would just run instead of keeping in place.
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