Introduction: Styrofoam Snowpeople

About: Dad, maker, dreamer, hacker, painter.

In the spirit of the season, here is a fun little craft that you can make with your kids. Styrofoam snowpeople!

They are easy to make, fun to embellish and family friendly. Go make something with your kids, you won't regret it.
Besides, you won`t just have an awesome craft for your labours, you will have a great memory too.



Step 1: Gather Some Stuff

You will only need a couple of things to make these adorable little snow people.

Materials
  • Assortment of Styrofoam balls - from dollar store
  • bamboo skewers - from kitchen drawer
  • some scrap wood - I used pieces of kindling wood
  • embellishments - we used mainly buttons, pipe-cleaners, ribbon, and markers,  but let your imagination go wild.

Tools
  • a hot glue gun - parents only
  • some sand paper 
  • small hand saw
  • white glue
  • x-acto knife - adults only


Step 2:

Start with your scrap of wood. These little guys are light, so you don't need much of a stand. I cut my pieces to be roughly square. I did not even measure. This is craft time.

Sand them down to get rid of any rough edges. This is a perfect project for a child to cut their teeth on sandpaper...erm, that is to say give it a go. The pieces are perfect size for their smaller hands, so they aren't overwhelmed with manipulating the wood and can concentrate on what it is that the sand paper is actually doing.

Step 3: Cut Supports

Line up three styrofoam balls in either ascending or descending order, totally your choice. Just lie them down and do a quick measure with a bamboo skewer. You want your support to extend a little beneath the snowman, but do not want it to protrude through the head, so a measure the same as the three balls is about right. Make a mark, cut the skewer. Do this for as many snowmen as you were thinking about making. We made six, in three different lengths.

Step 4: Make the Snowman

Now you just press your snowballs onto your skewer, one at a time works best with a slow steady pressure. If you go to fast sometimes a hunk comes out the exit hole, also you want to mount the ball relatively straight. A little crooked adds to the appeal, but we don't want them to be unbalanced either.

Step 5: Mount That Snowperson

Time to get this little people standing up.

Find a drill bit close to the diameter of your bamboo skewers and drill a hole in the center of each base.

Use a small dab of white glue to affix the skewer into the hole. Leave it to dry. If any bamboo protrudes from the bottom and makes the base unstable after drying, a gentle sanding will fix the problem.

Step 6: Some Personality

Now it is time to decorate them up and give them some personality. 

This is completely individual thing, I will show you what I did, but don`t feel obliged to do as I did. Make your own designs, use up some of your craft junk. I happened to have a whole lot of buttons still lying around from the other week. (There was this addictive challenge and I was spending my free time mantra-ing `buttons,buttons,buttons` ...but we are all better now, thanks for asking)

To make the hats I glued up some buttons, with a larger one at the bottom of the stack.

To make carrot noses I broke off and sanded to two points a small piece of bamboo skewer. Then I coloured it orange with one of my childrens craft marker.

The scarves on one set is made from bits of coloured ribbon, and the others are made of pipe cleaners. The buttons down their fronts are just glued in place.

If you have some younger kids, go do a craft with them, they will love it, and you won`t soon forget it. You are not just making crafts with them, you are making memories. Plus they will be learning and won`t notice because they think they are playing.

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