Find Kids’ Crafts Using Recycled Materials at Family Fun Online

I’m the kind of mean momma who does not do Disney.

My little daughter is a self-styled princess, sure, but she’s more of a fairy tale princess, a Princess and the Pea princess. Her contexts for Cinderella and Snow White are completely different, and she doesn’t know who Belle and Jasmine are at all.

I do, however, love myself some Family Fun magazine. It’s part of the great Disney war machine, and I was not pleased when each issue began to include an entire page of Disney worship, but the magazine itself is just my speed–quirky, thematically appropriate, cheap craft projects and hands-on activities for active children.

My favorite thing about Family Fun magazine, and its free online counterpart, Family Fun, is its emphasis on crafts made from natural and recycled materials. Wenona raved about Family Fun’s nature crafts earlier, but here’s a round-up of Family Fun’s best crafts made from recycled materials, all with free online tutorials:

  1. Cardboard tube marble runs. The photo above is a refrigerator marble run, but this free-form marble run is actually even more fun, since you can make it waaaaaaay bigger. We make this marble run around Christmas, when it’s easy to snag wrapping paper tubes from family members.
  2. Soda can luminaria. My favorite part of this project is that it utilizes a pole (Family Fun uses a dowel, but we use a stick) so that children can carry around their lantern in relative safety, with supervision. We don’t buy aluminum cans ourselves, but when offered a can of soda or beer at a party, we’ll often take the empty can home to craft with before recycling.
  3. Glitter globes. As in the sand art project, this project utilizes all those little odd jars, containing anything from spaghetti sauce to artichoke hearts, that you inevitably collect from the grocery store. Mind you, I have never used the FIMO clay as called for in this tutorial; we always use a strong epoxy glue on the inside of the jar lid, and more epoxy glue to make sure that the lid stays closed and little girls can’t drink the glycerin- and glitter-spiked water inside.
  4. Bottle cap snake. This project does require some dedicated bottle cap collecting, but the result is a toy that is super fun, with a satisfying heft to it and loads of possibilities for imaginative play.
  5. Plastic bag pom-poms. For dress-up or Halloween costumes or just plain cheering, these plastic bag pom-poms are a vastly preferable product to brand-new store-bought versions. The plastic bags aren’t much altered in the creation of the craft, so they’re still recyclable when your kid gets tired of her toy.

See? Not a single Disney princess in the mix!

4 thoughts on “Find Kids’ Crafts Using Recycled Materials at Family Fun Online”

  1. Pingback: Halloween Safety for Children » Find Kids’ Crafts Using Recycled Materials at Family Fun Online – Crafting A Green World (blog)

  2. It is great to see people having fun with crafts and conserving resources at the same time! Creative Crafts 4 Kids has many crafts from family fun crafts, including many crafts with recycled materials. I also liked their paper bag crafts that I found at: http://www.creativecrafts4kids.com/paper-bag-crafts.html. They were a great way to take paper bags that were going to be thrown away and use them for something fun!

  3. Pingback: Sticky Business: Posts We Liked This Week | An Eclectic Blog

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