Crafting with kids: making an ocean in an eggbox with peg doll mermaids

Last week’s home learning theme was ‘the seaside’ which gave us lots of inspiration for crafts to go alongside the school-work. We revisited a couple of ‘under the sea’ crafts which I’d done before with the girls as well as trying a few new ideas. Our favourite craft activity was making peg doll mermaids to go inside an ocean in an egg box.

 

 

An ocean in an egg box

You will need:

• A cardboard egg box
• Blue and green paint mixed together
• Paintbrush
• Craft foam in various colours
• Grey tissue paper
• Blue tissue paper
• Scissors
• Glue

 

1) Paint the inside of the egg box with the blue-green paint mixture and leave to dry. Repeat on the outside of the egg box.

 

 

2) Scrunch up pieces of grey tissue paper to make rocks and glue these inside the egg box.

 

3) Cut shapes out of the craft foam to make the flora and fauna to go in your egg box ocean. We cut out fish shapes and wiggly sea-weed shapes. Glue these to the inside of the egg box. We also added a small glittery pompom to make a sea urchin.

 

 

4) Cut the blue tissue paper into thin wavy strips and place these loosely inside the egg box to make watery waves to finish off your egg box ocean.

 

 

 

Peg doll mermaids

You will need:

• A dolly clothes peg
• Petits-fours cases (you will need 3-4 per mermaid)
• Short pieces of raffia or wool.
• Small stick-on gems.
• Scissors
• Sticky tape
• A glue gun.
• Marker pens

 

1) Cut down one side of the petits-fours cases and around the base to leave just the outer part.

 

 

2) Wrap the petits-fours case around the bottom of the peg and use a small piece of sticky tape to hold in place. Flatten the case around the bottom of the peg to make the mermaid’s tail fin.

 

3) Wrap a second petits-fours case just above the first one and tape in place. Repeat with more petit-fours cases until the bottom half of the peg is covered.

 

 

4) Cut small strips of raffia or wool for the mermaid’s hair and stick these to the top of the peg using a glue gun.

 

 

5) Stick two gems to the top half to make the mermaid’s sea-shell bikini top and another gem to one side of the mermaid’s hair for a hair decoration. We used hot glue to hold these in place too and the sticky pads on the back of the gems didn’t stick very well to the dolly pegs.

 

 

6) Add facial features with a marker pen.

 

 

The ocean in the egg box was quite easy for Sophie to make with very little help from me. The peg doll mermaids were much more fiddly though. Sophie needed quite a lot of help with making these. She was very pleased with the end result though!