Simple Craft-of-the-Week: Paper Cats!

With Halloween on Wednesday, I thought a "black cat craft" would be fun. We also are getting ready to do "C" week, so it seemed even more appropriate!

This is a REALLY easy craft that can be embellished as much as you'd like. I show a black cat in this tutorial, but you can do any kind of cat -- tigers, lions, your pet!
First, get out your supplie -- 9x12 construction paper (shown here folded in half to make a 9x6); pencil, colored pencils (on the black paper, white really shows up nicely!), marker and glue stick and scissors.With the fold at the top, draw the cat's tail, than the body as one piece -- legs, up and around (to leave space for head) and then the other leg up to the neck. I've shown here the head drawn between the legs (you can be persnickety and use a cup to draw a perfect circle, but I like the more natural less-than-perfect look!). I've also drawn triangles for the ears.Cut out the pieces -- here you can see that this makes a 4-legged beast as God made the cat!Glue the pieces in place ... don't worry too much about placement. Kids can tip the cat's head (even accidentally) and the cats look much more real. Here, I've shown the tail being glued to the front -- if you'd like to make the tail look "more" realistic, glue the tail in place on the back side of the cat.Draw in details -- here we used a green colored pencil to make the eyes "glow".

Now, if you want to make a lion, here's what we did .... using yellow paper we did just as above. The mane is cut from two squares of paper -- one orange, one yellow -- that are about 4" x 5" (the orange is a bit smaller) ... we then randomly cut strips going toward the center (leaving a 1.5 x 1.5 inch center). Crinkle this in your palm to get the mane separated ...and then glue the cat face onto the mane and the mane onto the body.Some tips for this project:
1. the better quality (or heavier) construction paper the better ability to stand
2. the placement of the head affects the "tippiness" of the cat -- if necessary, you can make a paper brace to hold the legs up by cutting a strip of paper, folding each end in about 1/2 an inch or so, and gluing these "tabs" to the feet (as shown above) or higher up the leg to be less obvious
3. you can really go wild with these -- using yarn for manes, pipe cleaners for whiskers, color the cat before cutting out (black stripes on orange would make a tiger), etc.

Just have fun with this one!

Here are our cats .... And the back end so you can see what that looks like, too!