Is it snowing in your area? If it isn’t (or even if it is), you can make your very own DIY Snowman from a plastic bottle and bring a little of the outdoors in where it is nice and warm! So gather up your craft supplies, make yourself a mug of hot chocolate, and bring the children around to make a great craft together!
My pen-pal of 25 years (does that ‘age’ me?) sent me a letter in December with an idea for a craft for the children. He had it all drawn out with descriptions, which was very helpful. As it was December and we didn’t have a shortage of Christmas crafts, so I thought we would be patient and wait until January when things are a bit more slow and I’d have something up my sleeve to do on a bleary day.
That day (or rather 2 as we split the craft up a bit to wait for the glue to dry a bit, and to prolong the excitement) came last week. The weather was wet and cold, and on Friday there were even a few flakes of snow while we were crafting! But alas, they melted as they touched the ground for us; although other places just a few miles from us had much more snow. This meant that we couldn’t go out and make ‘real’ snowmen, but that didn’t stop us from making our own DIY snowman from used plastic bottles!
The first step, of course is to consume the contents of a plastic bottle (the size of your choosing; John gave instructions for a 2 litre bottle, but we used some small 250ml bottles I had saved for this craft. Wash out and dry your bottle once it’s been emptied, of course!
We used a glue paddle to smear some tacky glue around the bottle from the neck down. Then we covered the bottle with some cotton wool. You could pull apart cotton balls, or cotton batting; whatever you have around is just fine. We had some cotton wool in folds that worked well for us. In our case, this covered just perfectly the bottle below the shoulders.
We repeated this process for the neck of the bottle, cutting the cotton to size.
This is where we left our snowmen on the windowsill to dry overnight before starting the creative dressing of the snowmen to give them their character.
The next feature we added to the DIY Snowman was a head. We used a ‘snowball’ from some garland I had picked up on sale after Christmas last year at a charity shop. If we didn’t have this, I would have used John’s instructions to crumple up a plastic grocery bag (or a piece of newspaper) into a ball and cover that with cotton. We put some glue just inside the neck of the bottles and gently pressed our snowball onto the neck of the bottle.
Next the children chose some mini pom-poms to use as buttons down the front of each DIY snowman. They dipped the pom-pom into some glue, and then gently placed the ‘buttons’ onto each snowman.
Then they chose some even smaller pom-poms for the facial features. This is excellent fine-motor skill practice, as picking up those little pom-poms can be quite tricky! (Of which I was reminded when it was time to tidy up and later in the day when I found the odd one that can been shot across the room and landed on the floor or elsewhere and it would nip out of my grasp and fly away to some new spot).
Next I used some felt scraps from the cupboard for the children to wrap around their snowman necks as scarves. It was a good time to do some reinforcement/review of colours while choosing pom-poms and felt.
To make the arms, each child chose the colour of pipe cleaner that they would prefer, and I helped to cut them in half. One end of the pipe-cleaner was stuck in some glue and then tucked up between the cotton wool seam at the shoulders of the snowman, and pushed up under the upper layer and patted down to hold it in place. This was repeated for the other arm. Then the arms were bent a little to make them more life-like.
To top off each snowman, the children glued the cap from the bottle onto the head of the snowman. Then they chose another, larger pom-pom to give it just a little more character.
Don’t you think these snowmen are adorable? Each one has it’s own personality! Too bad they have all been given the name of ‘Frosty’! Every snowman the children sees, or makes, must always have the same name-but at least it’s easier for me to remember!
There are so many ways this craft could be modified! You could even do grown-up versions and have your own competition! You could make whole families using various sized bottles, use different types of ‘snow’, the variety of scarves and hats and arms are endless!
If you’d like to expand on the snowman theme, try out our skiing marshmallow snowman snack to have with your hot chocolate. To find more uses for snowball garland, try our 3-D Snowman, or our snowball painting.
I’d love to see the photos of your DIY snowmen/women/children/animals, etc!
