Woven Paper Bunnies

Welcome to my second and final Easter art project of the year. Did you see my first one: Tissue Paper Easter Eggs?

This one is a little on the crafty side, but it’s good weaving practice, and it’s fun to choose which colors you want to pair together. It’s based on Danish woven paper hearts.

Now. Since you are weaving with paper instead of fabric, and it is less flexible, you will have to bend the paper somewhat during the weaving stage. We’ll get to that later on though.

Materials:

• Colored paper. We used our favorite colored card stock from Wausau Paper.
• Scissors
• Craft knife
• Glue – we used stick glue

Instructions: 

I tried to show each step clearly in the photos, but if you get stuck with the weaving, this site shows the technique well in illustrations. Plus the translated Danish is funny to read.

1. Cut two long strips from two different colors of paper. I used a thin metal ruler for the width of our strips and cut them together with a craft knife.

2. Still holding the strips together, fold them in half length-wise.

3. Still, still holding them together, round the ends with scissors. Free-hand it or use something like the bottom of a cup to trace around if you want a nice, even rounded edge.

4. Take one strip and lay it over the other strip perpendicular and at the bottom, as shown. Lightly draw a line with a pencil where they meet, but make sure to leave a little extra space at the bottom- you’ll need a little wiggle room when you are weaving the paper together.

5. Fold the strips back together, and cut three even cuts in them from the bottoms up to the line.

6. Now it’s weaving time! Hold them perpendicular at the bottoms and start weaving in the top strip from the right piece: Around the first strip, through the middle strip, around the third strip. Continue weaving with the other two strips. It will probably take your kids a few tries to figure this out, because you need to sort of wiggle and bend the paper strips as you are weaving them.

7. Cut out your eyes, nose and whiskers and glue ‘em on! We used a little hole punch for the eyes.

This project was inspired by the coolest book I’ve seen in a while- I got it from the library and din’t want to give it back, so I ordered one from Amazon: Magic Books and Paper Toys by Esther K. Smith. It’s one of those books that you flip over, so the magic books projects are accessed from one side and the paper toys from the other. I want to make everything in it, so you’ll be seeing more projects based on those I found in here….

 This post is linked up here:

and here: