Art and craft - Macaroni Party Hat

We made this together last Sunday (20 June 2010).

I got the idea from an episode of Higglytown Heroes, which isn’t about art and craft. It’s a kids cartoon about occupations in which they are depicted as heroes. They did not show how the macaroni party hat is made, but did show the kids wearing it. So I took it as a free-form-anything-goes type of hat. It took over an hour to complete!

Materials used:

Cardboard; craft glue; glitter dust; macaroni; paint brush (to brush the glue onto the cardboard); stars; roller stamper (and anything else for decoration e.g. paint, bits of coloured sweet wrapper); rubber bands (or ribbon to hold the hat onto the head)

How:

To get the shape of the hat, I traced the outline of a large circular basin onto a cardboard. I was lucky that it turned out to be a perfect fit for his head. Fold it in half into a semi-circle shape and when you’ve finished decorating it, just staple the ends together.

I brought out Mickey roller stamper then went off to bring the Ikea bed tray for him to use as a table. When I got back, I was pleasantly surprised that he had managed to flip open the ink pad cover and was happily rolling the stamper on the cardboard, on his own! He didn’t do it “right” in the sense that he used it more like a brush, rolling it a little back and forth, instead of rolling it in just one direction, all the way to the end. But, I was still happy to see him doing it by himself. Being cone shaped, I merely flipped it over for us to work on the final piece.

The Ikea bed tray for us to work on as it’d contain the mess. It’s also about the right height for him when seated on the ground. That idea of using the bed tray is thanks to his CST therapist!

I helped him squeeze out a bit of craft glue unto a plastic container (the bottle was very hard even for me to squeeze) then he used a paint brush to brush the glue onto the cardboard (to glue the glitter dust and macaroni)

He chose the colours of the glitter dust. I had to help him scatter it over the wet glue. But now that I think about it, I could have instead have stored the glitter in tiny containers and have him pinch out a bit to scatter.

He chose to stick just a few pieces of macaroni. I think that’s because it was the last decoration item that we used. It also involved a few too many steps for him – hold the brush, dip in glue pot, paint, put down brush, pick up macaroni, stick macaroni, and repeat all over again for another macaroni!

He was happy with the end product. He showed it off to papa, and brought it to physiotherapy too!