Milk Carton Windmill Supplies

Series Summary

One of the easiest ways to introduce your child to the world of artistic exploration is to allow them the freedom to initiate and participate in their very own arts and crafts projects. One very simple but truly fun project for children and adults is the creation of a milk carton windmill using a variety of art supplies and, naturally, creative vision! Parents who are drawn to such timeless and innovative hobbies as scrap-booking and homemade frame-making delight in the project featured in this series. Kids love creating their own designs and watching their mind's eye create something for friends and family to enjoy. In this free video series on children's crafts, a crafts enthusiast demonstrates how to make a milk carton windmill. Gather the necessary supplies for this fun kid's project, and learn to cut the right shapes for the perfect windmill. Learn to glue it together and find out how to add functioning, spinning blades. This fun arts and crafts project is great for children of all ages.

Video Transcript

"Today we're going to make a windmill and it's going to be a really authentic windmill once we're done, it's going to spin around real nice and quick. Let me show you the supplies we're going to need to make our windmill. First, we're going to need some wooden sticks. For these sticks we'll need about five of them, and we'll need one extra just to use for poking a hole later on in the styrofoam balls we're going to be using. These sticks are usually used for grilling over a barbecue and they usually can be found at a crafts store or even in a local supermarket, and we'll need again about six of those. We're going to be needing some corrugated paper, the reason why we need to use a corrugated paper is because we're going to put the sticks through them and we need a way for them to be - for, to hold them inside the paper. These are going to be the arms of the windmill that spin around, so it needs to be like a corrugated type of box so we can put those sticks through. We're also going to need a styrofoam ball. Now I have two of them just in case because I'm going to be putting a hole through the center, sometimes it doesn't always come exactly through the center, so I have an extra one just in case if we need, it's always good to have an extra one on hand. We're also going to need a ruler because we're going to have to do some measurements, measure the arms, make sure that they're the same size and also make some holes within the milk carton we're going to be using, so we just want to make sure that we have some good measurements. We'll be using a marker, also a pencil and an X-acto knife to make some cuts inside the milk carton, that's going to be the base of the windmill. We'll need a scissors, we can also have on hand a piece of cardboard that we can actually roll up and make it into a kind of a funnel type of, a type of funnel that we can use to pour sand into because the sand is going to be poured into the milk carton, and that's going to weigh the milk carton down, it will make the windmill steady, and we're going to be using three cups of sand, now it doesn't have to be sand, it could also - you can also use salt or anything else that will fill the milk carton up that will weigh it down. And there's the milk carton that we'll be using, it's going to be the base of our windmill, and depending on how you want to decorate the windmill, if you want to paint it, we'll be using a white base paint, it's basically a thick white paint that you put a coat over the milk carton that'll cover up any different colors and markings on it so that we'll be able to apply the colors that we want later on. But you don't have to use this paint, you can cover the milk carton with whatever you want, if you just want to use different colored paper and glue it on, that's also fine. But since we'll be painting we're going to have some paintbrushes and some acrylic paint on hand, and we're going to need some white glue, we're going to need a package of matchsticks, obviously they're not - they're called matchsticks but they're just the wooden ends of - about the same size as a match and they come in usually when you get a big package like this, comes in a lot of different colors, so our windmill will be very colorful. And we're going to need two little beads that are going to stick on the end of the ball when we glue it onto the milk carton, it's going to hold the ball in place, there will be a stick through it, and the two beads one at each end will hold the ball in place and be able to stay onto the milk carton. Now just keep in mind that the bead that you choose should be big enough to go onto the edge of the wooden stick."