How to Make a Paper Firecracker Hat

"Hi, this is Ginny with Simply Beautiful Crafts on behalf of Expert Village and we're going to make party hats. I like to call this a firecracker hat because it reminds me of a firecracker. It's made completely out of newspaper. The first thing you want to do is take two pieces of newspaper, open them up and starting at one side, roll it up fairly tight and you get all the way to the other end. Once you've rolled your newspaper all the way to the other end, you're going to take a pair of scissors and you're going to slice through the rolled up end like this. The farther down you slice, the bigger your firecracker will be. Once you've sliced it as far at you want, you're going to reach in to the middle and pull. Look at that. Here comes our firecracker. Okay, when you have it as long as you want it, re-roll it a little bit at the end, take a little bit of masking tape and wrap it around and now you have your firecracker. Then you'll want to cut it off to the length that you want it to be. The next thing you're going to want to do is make a hat band out of newspaper as well. For your hat band, I’m going to start at the bottom of the piece of newspaper; I'm going to take several sheets so you'll have a nice sturdy hat band and just roll it, fold it, roll it, fold it, roll it, fold it so that you'll have three folds and then secure it. Then you're going to want to size it. What I did for mine was I put it around my head the size I wanted and I didn't make it real tight because I was going to stick my firecracker inside. Once you’ve done that, you can put your firecracker inside and staple it or tape it. Now if you want to get real creative you could put several firecrackers around and have a really thick, nice, full hat. Look really like a fancy African headdress if you put it all away around the headband. In that case you would need to leave your band a little bigger. Once you have your firecracker in there, I used glitter glue and tempera paint and decorated my headband and that’s all there is to it. You can make your very own firecracker hat out of newspaper and masking tape."