Projects With Bubble Wrap
Bubble wrap is so useful that it's amazing it often comes free with your mail order shopping. Apart from the entertainment that the kids (and you) get from popping the bubbles, it is easy to recycle in children's art projects. Give yourself an environmental pat on the back while your kids work on their next exciting bubble wrap project.
-
Bubble Wrap Painting
-
Use bubble wrap in painting projects - including more than one bubble size gives interesting results. Scrunched-up balls of bubble wrap, secured with sticky tape and dipped into poster paints, create fascinating patterns on paper. Alternatively, use flat sheets of bubble wrap to transfer the circular patterns. Painting directly onto bubble wrap helps kids to understand how colors mix to make new ones as the paints run together in the grooves between colors. Cut fish shapes from colorful bubble-printed paper to make tropical fish with round scales. Glue the fish onto a blue, bubbly background with several, larger, white air bubbles, rising upward, for a great sea picture.
4th of July Firecrackers
-
Get the kids to paint toilet roll tubes with red and white stripes topped off with white stars on a blue background. When they're dry, fold black pipe cleaners in the middle and secure both ends with sticky tape inside one end of each tube, either side of the cylinder. Twist the pipe cleaners into one double length. They will look like bomb fuses. Roll up 2 x 3 inch pieces of bubble wrap and stick them inside the tubes with glue. Also glue pieces of orange tissue paper to the end of the fuses so that the firecrackers look "ready to blow." On the 4th of July the kids set the crackers off, poking their fingers into the tubes to make noisy popping sounds.
-
Jeweled Gift Box
-
Find a cardboard box with a fold-in lid. Measure and cut a piece of large-bubble bubble wrap so that it is long enough to fit around your box and wide enough to cover it from top to bottom. Secure it with double-sided sticky tape. Cut bubble wrap to fit the top and bottom square (or rectangle) of the box, and tape the two pieces in place. Use a gold paint spray can in a well ventilated area to cover the outside of the bubble wrap. When it is dry, cover with a layer of clear fixative. Leave overnight and use colored markers to turn the bubbles into a variety of colored jewels.
Earring Holder
-
Find an old picture frame. Cut a piece of bubble wrap (of the small bubble variety) four inches wider and longer than the frame. 10 x 13 inch frames are fairly standard. One of those, or larger, would be ideal. Lay the frame in the middle of the sheet of bubble wrap and mark where each corner rests with a pen. Cut each corner off of the rectangular, or square, sheet - up to the pen marks. Stretch the bubble wrap over the front of the frame, with the bubbles facing outward. Stick the outer flaps to the back of the frame with strong sticky tape. Hang the frame, or stand it on the top of a dressing table. Pairs of earrings hook neatly together through neighboring bubbles.
-
References
- Photo Credit Marc Debnam/Photodisc/Getty Images
