Today we are going to show you another part of our authentic Native American costumes for your child and today we are going to do the boy’s costumes, a loincloth. It’s going to look something like this; pretty inexpensive materials as you can see but can I just tell you how much your little boy is going to love this. Here are two examples of what they are going to look like, Things you are going to need to make your loincloths are some craft paper or one of these; I just use the grocery bag from the grocery store. You need some nagahide cut into thin strips. Of course, you need to make it pretty long, so it will go all the way around and you have some tying room. You are going to need some crayons, a stapler, some scissors, some brown temper paint washed down with some water and a large paint brush, fairly large paint brush. After you cut your nagahide into a long thin strip, of course it doesn’t have to be real accurate; again you can talk about how the Native Americans used animal skin to do these kinds of things. Take the craft paper, of course again, this would be the animal skin if we were actually making it in Native American days. We are going to take our paper and fold it over our strip of nagahide, couple of folds, since it feels fairly secure, we are going to take our stapler. We are going to staple so the side they goes next to your child, it has the smooth side. We don’t want the bumpy side because it might get catch onto their clothes and catch onto their fingers, so give them a few staples. Again, we are going to use our Indian symbols to tell a story. We are going to use crayons; there is one thing that you need to talk to your child and that is bearing down really hard with their crayons. The reason why is we are going to paint this later and the crayon, the wax in the crayons are going to show through the paints, so we want it to be really dark. Now after all that’s completed depending on how old your child is, if you don’t feel comfortable with them using scissors you can do this, or of course they can use it their own scissors. We are going to just snip in the paper about an inch and a half to two inches, just to make some fringe, kind of push them up so it’s kind of fringy. Now one another thing that I like to do and now kids going to say what in the world you are doing, you have ruined it my beautiful picture, is to crunch it up, spread it back out, and then after we do our brown wash over it, it’s going to look just like leather animal skin, so after you have done all that, you are going to get your brown paint you know water it down. This probably could be a little more watery, again you are going to need something over the table; the plastic tablecloth whatever works for you so that’s not going to get all over the house and the kids love doing this. You just let them paint, across their picture and I tell them to spread it out, you don’t want it too dark and after this dries, it looks just like deer skin or buffalo skin and when your are finished, you are going to have something that looks like this for your young Native American to tie around and wear it to the first Thanksgiving at your house.
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