Valentine lantern bag

(Goblin is 28 months)

This week I decided to take up challenges on two separate blogs and combine them in one activity.

Tinkerlab have a challenge to make something creative with a paper bag, and Living Montessori Now have a  Valentine blog hop. Now I have to confess that I will probably be disqualified from the Tinkerlab challenge because one of the rules is that the craft activity should be child directed. While I did leave Goblin to have a lot of fun and freedom while making this creation it was definitely mummy directed.  I had an idea of what I wanted to end up with and I suspect if I had let the activity be completely child directed we would have had a paper bag full of cars.

I got a gift voucher for Monsoon from my old work team when I left last month. I spent it on a lovely dress for work. As a result I also acquired some pretty pink and red tissue paper and a Monsoon paper bag. Ideal for a valentine activity. 

Goblin is quite into cutting with his new craft scissors (suppose to be my new craft scissors!) so I cut the tissue paper into strips and let him attempt to cut the strips into squares. He enjoyed the activity but wasn't very good at cutting - he closes the scissors but then pulls them and rips the paper rather than opening them to cut it. If the scissors were sharper that technique would work but rather than give him sharper scissors I think I'll just keep working on getting him to close and then open the scissors. 

For what I was planning it didn't matter that most of the tissue paper was ripped rather than cut. I laid some sticky back plastic on the floor and got Goblin to stick the tissue paper to the plastic. 

He really enjoyed this. Especially when I showed him that he could do it by dropping it from a height and letting it rain down onto the plastic. 

 Its just as well we had a lot of tissue paper squares because quite a lot did not end up on the plastic!

 But he had fun putting the tissue paper into a play silk, and later into his lorry. 

 In the mean time I cut a heart shaped hole in the Monsoon paper bag and stuck the sticky back plastic to the inside of the hole. No glue required, you just use the sticky edges of the sticky back plastic. 

This is what it looked like.

Pretty cool I thought. But that wasn't the end of our little project. Next I suspended a light from the handle (I used a reading light because it was lighter, but a torch would be fine.)

The finished lantern can be hung by the bag handles from the front door on Valentines day. Or you could make a load of smaller ones with tee-lights inside them and line the garden path.

Here is what it looks like with the torch hung inside the bag.

I'm linking this to the two blogs mentioned above and