Using Clothes Hangers for Arts & Crafts Projects for Kids

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Debbie with Expert Village.com and today we are going to talk about doing some fun craft activities with plain old ordinary coat hangers right out of your closet. These are called Happy Hangers. This is the bee we are going to talk about making today. This is from a book that I happen to have written for a great publishing company called Fox Street Press. He makes all kinds of wonderful educational books and activities for young kids and the name of the book is Happy Hangers. First you are going to need some tissue paper; this is about a variety pack here, so I can get the yellow out of it, use some other colors for other things. Some tissues are better than others. The less expensive tissue you might see during holidays is usually not good at tears easier, the quality you find at the gift wrap area in the store is better, you are going to need some good old glue or you can use a glue stick. I prefer this glue and I will tell you why later. You are going to need some scissors. The patterns, now you can make your own patterns or if you could purchase the book, you can print them off yourself on a copy machine. But these are ones I just drew off by hand and they are very easy to do. I suggest that when you are prepping the activity especially if you are doing it for more than one child, put all the pieces in a baggy, this is a really good way to teach organizational skills, take the pieces out as soon as your are done cutting, put the good stuff in, throw the trash away, then you have all your pieces and you don’t have anybody upset that they have lost an eye, an antenna or something. So I put everything in a baggy, talk about being careful, organized, keeping all your pieces together. Often if I’m just drawing off the patterns myself, I will fold the paper when you need to of something and we call this magic cutting; kids love it, and you cut it once and you get two; they just save some time on cutting, Talk about staying on the lines, controlling what you are doing, and some of these pieces are small. Your younger children may need some help cutting, and that is another option too is just to cut the pieces out for your child and then glue it together, that will work too. There are a lot of different patterns you can make out of Happy Hangers. In the Happy Hanger book there are a couple of patterns for every month and I am just going to show you a few to get an idea or you can create your own. Here is a butterfly, have a little pumpkin for October, have a scarecrow for November, he is one my favorites, they get to add a little bit of chalk to this one too, we have a kite for March, and we have a sunshine for the summer and the hot months. "