All kids, boys and girls, go through a pretend food phase. Cooking, tea parties, picnics…and you can go far down the rabbit hole buying plastic peppers, wooden watermelons, or felt fettuccine.
Especially if you suspect this is a short lived phase, craft these treats to play with your kids. Pizza, a big pretzel, popcorn, and cotton candy…all made from upcycled materials.
So fun to make, but not so tasty to eat!
What you’ll need:
• Brown paper grocery bags
• Tacky glue
• White, red, and yellow paint
• Paintbrushes
• Newspaper
• 1 popsicle stick
• 1 square cracker box
• Scallop scissors
• Red crayon
• Resealable gallon-size plastic bag
• Packing peanuts
• Cookie sheet lined with wax paper
• Cardboard
• Magazines
Pretzel:
1 Cut a grocery bag into 3-inch-wide strips and glue them together to make a 24-inch-long piece.
2 Roll and crumple the strip into a rope shape, being sure to keep any labels or writing on the inside.
3 Fold the tube into a U shape, then bend the ends toward the bottom of the U, twist them, and glue them down, crisscrossed. (You may want to put the pretzel under a medium-heavy book until it dries.)
4 Paint white dots on as the salt.
Popcorn:
1 Unfold the cracker box. Measure 7 to 8 inches from the bottom folds to where the top of the popcorn box will be, and cut a line straight across with scallop scissors.
2 Paint the inside surface (nonprinted side) of the box white. Let it dry.
3 Color red stripes vertically on the painted side of the box with the crayon.
4 Reassemble and glue the box so that the decorated side is on the outside.
5 To make the popcorn, squeeze a quarter-size dollop of yellow paint into the resealable bag, add enough packing peanuts to fill the cracker box, and shake. Start with a little paint; you can always add more.
6 Set the popcorn out to dry on a sheet of newspaper. Once the popcorn is dry, fill your box.
Pizza:
1 Cut a triangle from cardboard, with two long sides of about 7 inches and a short side of about 5 inches. The short side of the triangle (the crust side of the pizza) should be slightly rounded.
2 Give your pizza some tomato sauce by painting the cardboard red and let it dry.
3 To make the crust, roll and crumple a 4-inch-wide-by-7-inchlong strip of brown grocery bag into a tubelike shape and glue it across the rounded edge of the pizza. Trim or glue any excess underneath.
4 Paint a 10-by-10-inch piece of newspaper yellow on both sides. Once it’s dry, fringe 1⁄4-inch strips of the paper (see the Fringing lesson on page 120) and then cut across to make tiny strips, about 1 inch long.
5 Cut pepperoni and peppers (or whatever toppings you like) from magazine pages in the appropriate colors.
6 Brush watered-down glue (in about a 1-to-1 ratio) onto the cardboard, then sprinkle the “cheese” on top. Glue the toppings on top of the cheese.