Kids Crafts: Maracas Instruments (& Rattles)

Here is a quick and cute Easter Craft idea for you – DIY Maracas and little rattles – this would be a lovely gift for kids to make for their baby siblings or you could make for your kids. You can make these any time of year or as an alternative Easter Gift. Both the homemade maracas and the rattles are so easy to make and don’t cost much at all..

You will need:

Materials: an empty egg shell, PVA glue or decoupage glue, tissue paper (we save ours from wrapping paper), dried beans or chick peas old beads/ buttons or rice, ribbon or a little paint to decorate. For the maracas you will also need two chop sticks/ sticks or in our case a sturdy straw (I think it came from a balloon holder?).

You can use homemade Paper Mache paste too. But it sometimes makes white tissue paper a little brown. Also I find glue makes the egg really “tough” and  therefore not breakable!

Our noise maker are chick peas, though I think beads could sound lovely, or little stones. Try out what works for you!

1) Follow the Egg Blowing Instructions from one of my earlier posts – remember you can make one of the holes a bit bigger, as you will need a bigger hole to add your noise maker. Of course you can make these with plastic eggs, but you will a) have to make a hole at the bottom (please take care) and b) I LOVE using the real eggs, as it makes this a super thrifty and environmentally friendly craft.

2) Once your egg is clean and dry – fill it with chick peas (or whatever you have). Test for sound. If you are making the diy maracas, you now need to insert your sticks and glue into place. A good PVA glue will do – but you will have to let it dry for an hour or so. To speed things up, we used a hot glue gun. I made sure there was glue at the bottom or of our stick to stick to the inside of the egg and around the rim of the egg where the stick sticks out. Make sure it is nice and straight and aligned.

3) Cut out pieces of tissue paper and then start sticking it on – adding a layer of glue, then tissue paper, then more glue. A bit like our Eric Carle Easter eggs (in fact, the idea came to me afterwards and I wish we had made our Eric Carle eggs into rattles, as they make such cute little gifts!). We used green and blue for the rattles, and white for the maracas. I wanted the white, so that the children had as much freedom for decorating afterwards. With the maracas, we started by covering the hole. Make sure that the hole and the stick get plenty of layers to make the “connection” nice and strong.

4) Make sure you add plenty of layers – especially over the hole. I would say least 4. But add more to be safe. You don’t want your rattles to break! It is worth sticking to just using the brush to add the glue, but you fingers may get a little stick. Clean them if need be. Our eggs using decoupage glue dried quite quickly, but if you need to put them down to dry, do so on a ceramic dish – it is least likely to stick to this. But do turn it every so often to avoid it sticking too much.

5) Let dry and if required, decorate. We added some ribbon and some acrylic paint dots on the rattles.  And for the maracas, if like us, you used white tissue paper – then you can easily decorate with marker pens, paint or light coloured tissue paper.

Done.

I think the rattles make great alternative Easter Egg gifts. Hide them… and let the children find them on Easter Sunday!

The maracas are a great musical instrument craft for all year round!

Join the Kids Get Crafty linky party! Come and share your crafts with or for Kids.. we would love to see what you have been up to!

Have you made any Easter Bunny crafts yet? What about some Easter baskets?