Simple Chinese New Year crafts: Paper plate dragon

My daughter was beside herself with excitement when we were chosen to be Bostik Craft bloggers in 2015; and I was beside myself with terror *only kidding just a little bit*

This month, we were sent some craft goodies paid for by Bostik (from Craft Merrily) to put together some Chinese New Year crafts for our readers. After staring at the box for a good half hour, we finally got some inspiration, and are presenting the fruits of our combined brain cells to you now…our Chinese New Year crafts paper plate and cup dragon. I hope you all like it.

To be brutally frank, I was a little worried it was a little bit below par for crafty posts, but after much reassurance from the wonderful blogging community, and some excellent photography advice as well…here we are.

How to make a paper plate and cup Chinese Dragon for Chinese New Year

This is a simple craft; it has to be so I can do it. You can change the shape of the dragon, or decorate its body as well, making it even more interactive for your little one. The dragon is yours to command!

Materials:

Bostik sticky pads
Bostik glue dots
Gold paper cups
Red paper plate
Googly eyes (2)
Polystyrene ball
Colour tissue paper
Foam bracelet (red)
Gold and red card
Gold and red glitter (optional)
Woven gold string (optional).

Instructions:

1. Cut the plate into quarters as shown below.

2. Stick the paper plate together in a line with the foam pads / glue dots so the edges create loose dragon scales

3. Make a hole in the base of the paper cup and thread through the red foam bracelet. If you don’t have a bracelet, you can replace this with your own designed fork tongue of course

4. Fix the paper plate body to your dragon’s head using the bracelet that comes through the base of the cup (glue dots work best here), and also by pushing the plates on to the side of the cup (glue dots again). If you want, you can stuff the cup to make it more secure. We used a polystyrene ball for this; but you could use tissue paper, wool, or anything you have to hand

5. Put your dragon’s eyes on the side of the cup

6. Cut out some triangles from the gold and red card, and stick them to the top of the gold cup. Alternatively, cut simple tree shapes, so a triangle for the top, with a trunk coming down from the triangle base. Pierce small holes in the cup, and put the triangle on by pushing the “trunks” through the cup. You can see this here – look dragon scale trees ;-):

7. Cut some strips of tissue paper in lots of bright colours; perhaps orange, yellow and maybe even a bit more red, then attach them to the paper plates at the other end to make the tail. It works best if you stick the tail in between the last two paper plates like this:

After this, you can put some glue on the paper plate body, and add some glitter, and other decorations, perhaps even some Chinese lettering, or some more scales. Let you child go as wild as the dragon!

Now all you need to do is step back and admire the handiwork.

We hope you like our dragon – we definitely do. He makes an ideal decoration for the home for Chinese New Year. My kids have even being playing with him…

Happy crafting until next month when we will have more fun stuff for you to play with.

We were sent the items for this post by Bostik for free so that we could come up with an original craft for Chinese New Year. All ideas and photos are our own.

This post in part of the Chinese New Year Blog Hop on Peakle Pie – check it out!

Helen

Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine!Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time.KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10.It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania.Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on.Get in touch TODAY!