Kids Crafts: Flower Collage - Red Ted Art

Welcome back to our weekly easy kids crafts! We decided to make a collaborative Arty Flower Collage.

We save all the tissue paper and wrapping paper from the flowers and collected more over the weeks that followed. It was also a very timely craft, as Red Ted is doing lots of things about “growing” and flowers in nursery. So it is nice when our home activities tie in with those at school. We put a photo of our finished craft in his homework book!

A print out of the photo of this craft will be going into our Art Calendar for May!

The Flower Picture book:

Planting a Rainbow, Lois Ehlert

Firstly, I want to say, how much I am being (positively) influenced by my American crafty blog friends – Lois Ehlert is another author I came across thanks to them. It is what I love about blogging: the world becomes very small all of a sudden and I am inspired by people from the US, Canada, Down Under, Scandinavia and Croatia to name but a few… And Ehlert is of course a “classic” in the States. So here we are: Planting A Rainbow.

Planting a Rainbow is a beautifully illustrated book about well.. erm.. planting a rainbow: it begins with a trip to the garden centre to buy bulbs and seeds. It then shows them growing and turning into beautiful flowers. Wonderfully illustrated and colourful. Talking about lots of different pretty flowers. However not one our “favourites”.. as some of the drawings are a little to abstract for us – e.g. the daffodil looks like a star or sunflower to Red Ted. Also, we like to get excited about plants that turn into fruit and vegetables – especially since we have a lot of tomato and strawberry plants in our garden. But it is still a lovely book – especially for flower loving families. Pip Squeak (18mths) however adores all the colours. And it is a great book that you can use to explore the both flowers and rainbows! So I guess it is down to personal tastes and interests!

The Arty Flower Collage Craft

We decided to make a big bouquet of flowers! I had a rather “grand” idea of taking all the wonderful flower craft posts that have recently been linked to kids get crafty and create this “awesome collage”.

We decided that we needed to keep things simple!

So we made some Tissue Paper Flowers and we cut out lots of leaves and “blossoms” from the clear printed wrapping paper that the flowers came in.

Art Flower Collage Materials

One large sheet of paper (we used some off a roll),
paint for background and vase (the vase is made from an old craft where we used poppy husks to stamp with),
tissue paper,
pipecleaners,
paper,
clear foil with leaf and blossom prints,
scissors and glue.

How to make your Flower Collage with Preschoolers

1) First we painted out background – Red Ted did the sky (and decided to add clouds), Pip Squeak did the grass

2) We cut out a vase from an old craft and stuck it on

3) We stuck on our leaves and blossom

4) Made some tissue paper flowers: cut out 4 circles of tissue paper (all salvaged from the bunch of flowers/ gifts) – pierce with pipecleaner and twist to make a little centre. We also cut out yellow circles and Red Ted practice his cutting skills but cutting some petals out and some “red centre bits”. We also cute out pink petal shapes and added scrunched up tissue paper as the centres.