The wonderfully talented Bess Harding recently sent us this great craft. She makes beautiful prints and soft toys under the name Beeb, available from her Etsy shop and also keeps up a great blog of art, recipes and other things.
papier mâché money box
Here’s a creative way to encourage saving (which let’s face it everyone should try and do a bit more of these days) with a new take on the old piggy bank, using papier mâché.
What you will
need:
- Balloons
- Newspaper
ripped into strips roughly 2cm wide
- Wallpaper
paste (or flour and water mixed to a paste)
- Craft knife
- Masking tape
- Acrylic
paints & paintbrushes
- A bit of patience
1. Blow up
your balloon, until it has a diameter of around 10cm - go larger or smaller
depending on how much money you’re planning to save! Use a small piece of
masking tape to flatten down the end of the balloon.
2. Being liberal with the wallpaper paste, apply the newspaper strips to the balloon, smoothing as you go and making sure you cover every little bit. Repeat until you’ve built up a few layers all over. It’s better to have the walls as thick as possible so you get a nice sturdy globe. Then – and this is where the patience comes in – you need to leave it in an airy place for a couple of days, until the newspaper is bone dry.
3. When it is
dry, and it should feel quite solid, take your craft knife and carefully cut a
slot/mouth for the money to go in. If it hasn’t already, the balloon will pop
and you can jiggle it towards the hole you’ve made to pull it out. Then, if the
edges of the hole you’ve made look a bit raw, use some masking tape to smooth
them off.
4. Now it’s time to create your monster! I’ve painted a layer of white all over to begin with, and then using the money slot/mouth as a starting point, painted a face around it. You could make a friendly monster with flowers on it, or a scary monster, or a spotty one, or a stripy one. I’ve finished mine off with a layer of varnish to give it a bit of a shine. Once it’s dry it’s time to start saving!
p.s. You
might have noticed that there’s no way to open the monster, this is on purpose
so that you can’t dip in to your savings until you really need to. When the
time is right, you’ll have to sacrifice your monster, using a craft knife or scissors
to carefully enlarge the money slot until you can get your money out, then you
can start on a new one!
CUTE! thanks for the tutorial!
Posted by: cheryl | 02/03/2010 at 02:03 PM
Great idea ! I'll try it !
Posted by: t-shirt paris | 06/17/2010 at 05:27 PM
What a great idea! I need to remember this and give it a try.
Posted by: Ticia | 11/29/2011 at 09:24 AM
This is absolutely adorable and a great way to get kids to start saving.
Posted by: susan | 01/30/2012 at 10:39 PM
Make sure title from the page has your keyword in it.
More Details - Also, it is vital while performing search engine rank optimization to achieve the keyword phrase between tags near the top in the
content. Experts claim that people using the search engines
to find products, services or information rarely ever
browse after dark first three pages of the google search results, so getting a google search ranking within
the first three pages is especially recommended for successful use of the search engines to drive
traffic to your website.
Posted by: http://proimblogger.com/proxy-goblin-review/ | 11/25/2012 at 09:39 AM