Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Plastic Egg, Weeble Wobble-type, Family Craft


When I saw the plastic eggs on the clearance aisle of the grocery store, for some reason I thought of Weeble Wobbles - remember the old Romper Room toys, that wobbled, but wouldn't fall down?

My children have never seen Weeble Wobbles, even the newer versions sold now, so the concept of eggs they couldn't knock over was pretty fascinating to them. In fact, I probably could have just stuck some clay in the bottom halves of the eggs, snapped them shut, and called it good. The children would have thought that was a pretty neat toy.

I thought, it would be more fun to turn them into a family craft though, and have everyone decorate their own.

As I said, I weighted the eggs with clay - a non-drying clay, that I bought by accident a while back, when I meant to grab Sculpey clay. I had originally planned to hot glue rocks into the bottoms of the eggs, but they proved hard to get evenly balanced, and I was running low on glue sticks, and then I remembered the clay. It was a lot easier.

I paper mached (just pretend that word has all the correct accent marks) the eggs with a layer of glue and water dipped newspaper...


...followed by a layer of glue and water dipped white paper, when the newspaper was dry.


Once they were partially dry, I laid them across an egg carton, to allow the bottoms to dry too.


They could probably have been sanded lightly, to make them smoother for coloring, but we just colored ours bumps, and all.


It was fun to see how everyone decorated theirs. And, the best part is, our little family does wobble...


...but doesn't fall down.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

11 comments:

Ticia said...

I think the wrinkliness adds to the character. And we'll just pretend that spell checker thinks wrinkliness is a word.

Razzle Dazzle Mom said...

These are so adorable. We have some of the old weebles, and some new as well, but I think my kids would LOVE a weeble in their own likeness! Cute cute idea!

Christy Killoran said...

I love that you left the bumps too!

This is just too cute. I will have to copy this idea!

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

What a neat idea! I also want to copy it even though we have a "real" Russian "nevalyashka" doll - I guess the weeble wobble is an American version of the same thing. By the way, Russian version has a music bell inside that jingles when someone tries to knock it down.

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

Natalie - I must have seen something similar in the past, because I had a brief thought of putting a bell inside. That would probably driven the Man of the House insane though - especially with eight of them being played with at once :)

Debbie said...

I love this, if we still have a day inside I may just have to make some for Selena. She caught a commercial for Weeble Wobbles and is all about the little tune, "Weebles Wobble but they don't fall down."

phasejumper said...

Love this-enough paper mache for them to know what it is, without the mess and time of a pinata that I would have to finish on my own after they lost interest!

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

Phasejumper - Yah, being smaller they dried faster too, so we were able to do the entire project in one day - a real plus with younger children.

Anonymous said...

Going to copy this idea! I am new to follow you and do tons of you ideas. Right now we teeter on homeschool idea/theme overload- how do you decide what kind of topic to do? I want to do so many, an upcoming holiday, birds nesting in the yard, one kid is into cop and robbers, another under the sea, we have been doing parties for all the states statehood days...

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

I think that's why homeschooling is so much fun - you never have a lack of things to do, or learn about!

April D said...

These are adorable and EASY--except for the paper mache thing. :)
I think I'll brainstorm another way to do them with my kids. Sharpies on plastic?
We all LOVE weebles--they have my old, choking-hazard ones from thirty-five years ago.
:)
Happy Homeschooling!