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My three year old daughter gets a small amount of time with just me after her little brother goes down for his nap. This is her special time that she gets to do all the things that are harder to do while her brother is awake. A lot of the time she chooses to do crafts. On the other hand, my one year old son has no time that he is awake and his sister isn’t. The idea for this clothespin butterfly craft idea came when my son got to make tie dye hearts for Father’s Day cards.
My daughter watched him do a craft of his own and I could tell that she was jealous. There was no reason not to let her have a turn, so after he finished, I let her tie dye a paper towel too. It looked so fun and colorful that I wanted to make it into something. We decided on making it into simple clothespin butterflies.
Making a Clothespin Butterfly Craft From Paper Towels
Materials:
- Paper towel
- Dropper
- Food dye or watercolors
- Tape
- Clothespins
- Marker
- Googly eyes (optional)
- Pipe cleaner
- White glue
How to Tie Dye a Paper Towel:
When coming up with a Father’s Day card design, I got the idea for tie-dyeing paper towels from Happy Hooligans. To tie dye the paper towel for these butterflies, I did the exact same thing as I did with son, with my daughter. First, I started with a paper towel, a dropper, and three small paper cups of water mixed with red, blue, and yellow food dye. I placed it all on a plastic tablecloth. When making salt paintings several weeks ago, we mixed our dyed water way too weak. So, I made sure to use less water this time. You can also use watercolors.
Then, I let my daughter use the dropper to squirt red, yellow, and blue dyed water on her paper towel. She wasn’t careful about fully emptying her dropper between colors, so she accidently made green. She thought that was the coolest thing and spent most of the rest of the time trying to make more green. Once she covered her whole paper towel, I had her stop. Since at this point I wasn’t planning on making it into a craft, I wasn’t taking any pictures. Then, I sped up the drying process by using a hairdryer.
How to Make the Butterflies:
After the tie dye paper towels were dry, I cut my daughter’s half sheet paper towel in half. The two layers of the paper towel separated while drying, so we ended up with four paper towels to use as butterfly wings.
Then, I showed my daughter how to scrunch up the paper towels and tape around the middles. Next, I cut a piece of tape in half width-wise for her to tape the wings to a clothespin with. She struggled with both of these tasks, so I ended up doing a lot of this part.
Now it was time to decorate. I originally wanted to use googly eyes, but my daughter decided she wanted to draw everything on with a marker instead. She drew two eyes on the first butterfly. Then, she accidently drew one eye on the third one and thought it was so funny that the 4th one got one giant eye.
Lastly, we glued on small pieces of pipe cleaners for antennas. Hot glue would probably work better, but we used white glue so my three year old could keep helping. It seemed to work best if she squeezed glue on the end of a pipe cleaner and then placed it inside the clothespin. She bent some of the pipe cleaners to make them more antenna-like. Later, I went back and squeezed a bit more glue on top of each pipe cleaner to help reinforce them.
It took a while for the butterflies to dry, but once they were, the antenna were pretty sturdy. After they dried, I clipped them to our homemade artwork clothesline. They immediately flipped over due to gravity. To avoid having upside down bat butterflies, I had to clip them really far up the clothespin.
Outcome of Our Tie Dye Clothespin Butterfly Craft
After I found a way to clip the tie dye butterflies, they are a really fun decoration. My daughter really likes her clothespin butterfly craft and I think they add a fun splash of color. I am sure this isn’t the last time we will be tie dying paper towels since it was so simple and fun. And the butterflies were so easy to make with them. Overall, it was a good simple craft. It seems like our crafts have been getting a little more complicated recently, so this was a nice break. What would you make with tie dye paper towels?
