ShabbyShe

Kids’ craft: Milk bottle boats

This was a fun afternoon in the school holidays – making boats from recycling scraps! This craft is easy for children of any age and a great rainy day boredom-buster – plus when it brightens up you can go and float your boats in a stream!

For this project we used the following (washed!) items from the recycling bin:-

• plastic milk cartons
• lids from liquid laundry detergent
• lolly sticks
• fabric scraps (from my huge mountain of scraps, including some old shirts!)

From our craft supplies, we used:-

• PVA glue
• hot glue (to glue plastic and wood)
• pom poms
• pipe cleaners
• scissors
• sellotape
• felt tip pens

As you can see, the larger milk cartons (in this case, 4 pints) make an excellent “hull” if you cut them lengthways. A responsible adult really needs to do this part, but as none was available I did it 😉

We had three children for this activity (my two plus a friend) and it was great to see 3 different approaches to decoration. Here, pipe cleaners were attached to the hull to make a mast and flag pole.

My daughter decided hers needed a purple carpet, pink pennant flag and several pompoms!

This upcycled shirt fabric made a great sail, along with some lolly sticks 🙂

I particularly love the ingenuity that went into this craft – the main boat was a plastic detergent bottle cap, extended with pieces of milk carton, lolly sticks, pipe cleaners and a milk lid for the crow’s nest.

Don’t you just love it when kids really get into an idea and make it their own? A great way to spend a rainy day, which we followed up with a sailing contest in the stream!

What ingenious uses do you put your recyclables to? Comment below or tweet me @ShabbySheUK 🙂