Have you and your little ones started crafting for St. Patrick’s Day yet? Ever since March 1st rolled around, we’ve been in rainbow, shamrock, and leprechaun crafting mode. And there is one craft in particular that our little nugget and I both fell head over heals for this year, so we wanted to make sure to share it with all of you. Our stand-out St. Patrick’s Day craft of 2019 is…drumroll please…Shape Shamrocks!
Last month I was literally drooling over Cassie Stephens’ Kindergarten Hearts project – inspired by the book The Shape of My Heart, by Mark Sperring. Cassie had her students decorate a foam heart with various foam shape stickers. Once decorated, the hearts became printing plates. They applied paint to the foam shapes and pressed a piece of paper down firmly on top, to create their very own heart prints.
I immediately filed this fantastic idea away for next Valentine’s Day…but as it turns out, I just couldn’t wait that long. π And so our Shape Shamrocks craft was born!
Shape Shamrocks
Phase One – Adding Shapes
To create your shamrock shape printing plates you will need some foam shamrocks and some foam shape stickers (in various sizes). We purchased both from our local Hobby Lobby.
Start by adorning your shamrocks with the shape stickers. It is easier to start placing stickers on the outside border of the shamrocks and work inward. You also want to make sure that your shape stickers are all contained within the shape of the shamrock – you don’t want any random points sticking out that will ultimately make your shamrock print look less like a shamrock. When you’re finished, you want one even layer of stickers covering the entire shape of the shamrock (with no stickers stacked on top of one another).
Our little nugget had the best time decorating! What child doesn’t like sticking stickers on everything?!? It was also a wonderful opportunity for her to practice all of her shape, size, and color-recognition skills. We both had so much fun sticking our shapes onto our foam shamrocks, that we decided to make two shamrocks each!
Phase Two – Shamrock Printing
Now it’s time to make some shamrock prints! For this step, you will need at least one of your shape-adorned shamrocks (from phase one), some green tempera paint, a mini foam paint roller with a plastic paint tray, and some white paper.
Pour a decent amount of green tempera paint into the paint tray. Gently roll the mini foam roller into the paint until the roller is completely coated. Place a shape shamrock on top of some paper towels (or some other type of messy mat) and gently roll the green paint onto the shapes. This was our little nugget’s favorite part! π Once all of the shapes are covered in green paint, take a white sheet of paper and place it over the top of the paint-covered shape shamrock. Press down firmly and give the shamrock a little massage…BUT…be very careful not to let the paper slip or slide, because it will cause your shamrock print to smear. When ready, carefully peel back the sheet of white paper and marvel at the beautiful shamrock print that you just created.
You can repeat the shamrock-printing process as many times as you would like. Just make sure to roll a new coat of paint on top of the shapes before each print. We each chose one of our shape shamrocks to use for printing (and we kept the other as-is, because we absolutely loved the beautiful rainbow of color that the shape stickers created). Once we were finished printing, we set our shamrocks aside to dry completely.
Phase Three – Rainbow Backgrounds
Shamrocks share a pretty strong association with St. Patrick’s Day, but the first thing that pops into our minds when we think about St. Patrick’s Day…is rainbows! We love rainbows! I mean, what’s not to love? Needless to say, we needed to find a way to add some rainbow magic to our shamrock craft. So, we broke out our set of Kwik Stix and transformed some white card stock into beautiful rainbow backgrounds for our shamrock prints.
If you have not used Kwik Stix before, I highly recommend picking up a set, because they are AWESOME! They are basically the size and shape of a glue stick, but they are filled with vibrant colors of tempera paint. You just uncap the stick and paint (no water, no brushes). And the best part is that the paint dries in 90 seconds! They are pure magic and we absolutely love using them for various craft projects!
I handed our little nugget the rainbow-hued paint sticks and asked her to create a background that would cover the entire sheet of card stock. She was more than happy to oblige. π When our backgrounds were complete, we cut out one of our shamrock prints, applied some Elmer’s glue to the back, and adhered it to our array of rainbow colors! When we stood back to admire our St. Patrick’s Day masterpieces, we both let out a happy little squeal!
As I mentioned before, my daughter and I both fell in love with our (spare) colorful shape shamrock…so we decided to use them for another fun St. Patrick’s Day display. We glued them next to one of our other shamrocks prints and used some scrapbook scissors to create a unique border around the edge of the paper!
These Shape Shamrocks have easily become one of our all-time favorite holiday crafts! You can simply never go wrong with a Cassie Stephens-inspired art project. We fall in love every single time that we complete one of her amazing tutorials – be it our Lively Loud Mouth Art Project, or our Spiral Snowmen, or our Mixed – Colorful Heart Communities. Cassie is an art teacherin’ genius! And we have a long list of her art projects that we are just dying to try out – so if you need us, you know where we’ll be. π
HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!
