Crepe Paper Rainbow Collage

We're stuck in this funny place: winter but not really winter at the same time. Very little snow outside but enough so that we can not go out without snow pants. Too cold to really spend the day out there, but nice enough to feel like we have to get outside for something. Everything is brown, white, and gray. So this week we've decided we need to add some color to our world which has included some fun rainbow play.

Last year around this time we made St. Patrick's Day Windsocks using crepe paper streamers, and as we still have the crepe paper, we put it to use again.

For this project we not only used the crepe paper, but another favorite material: contact paper. We've used contact paper to create a rainbow before too, in an original Sticky Rainbow Collage project. For this collage we used a similar process, although we knew we wanted it to hang the finished product in the window. 

Materials: 

crepe paper streamers (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple)

contact paper

cotton balls

hot glue gun

permanent marker

scissors

To start, cut two pieces of contact paper roughly the same size. Before peeling the first one, draw a half circle (or rainbow shape) onto the paper with permanent marker. Then peel the wax paper off and lay this sheet sticky side up. Set the other piece aside. 

Using scissors, and starting with the red streamer roll, cut small pieces off of the role and start edging the outside of the rainbow. Big Brother was old enough to do this on his own. Fill the whole outside edge with red strips. 

Repeat with the remaining colors: working in order from red to purple, until the whole shape is filled. Carefully peel the other piece of contact paper from its backing and place sticky side down on top of the collage. 

Trim the excess contact paper off from the rainbow. (Side note, we trimmed our rainbow down exactly to the edge, which left nothing left to stick to and our rainbow started to peel. We had to add small spots of scotch tape at a few key spots on the edges. Next time we plan to leave a small edge of contact paper around the edges.) 

Use the hot glue gun to carefully glue the cotton balls to the edges of the bottom of the rainbow. In our case, I put down the glue and Big Brother added the cotton balls. 

When it's all done, you could hang it on the wall and it would still look nice. But we wanted ours in a window so the light could shine through and add little more color to our days. It almost glows on our playroom window! 

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