Fall Paper Bag Crafts

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I think one of my new favorite craft materials might be brown paper lunch bags. During our fall theme we made 4 different paper bag crafts, Acorn, Spider, Scarecrow, and Pumpkins and I am sharing below how to make each of them.

These were so fun to make and use things we already had on hand around the house.

First take a bag and fill it up with crumpled up paper. We get Scholastic Reading Club flyers in the mail each month and I save some of them to use for things like this. They are the perfect light weight crinkle-able paper.

Next take the open end and fold it in to make a tapered bottom like the bottom of an acorn. We stapled it closed so it would stay shut.

Paint a half a paper plate brown and a stem brown and then glue to the top (forgot to take a picture of this step). My original thought was to just leave it at that, but Little Miss insisted the acorn have a face and she said it had to have blue eyes and blue eyes is what he got.

To create the scarecrow, I started off having Little Miss cut out the hat and nose piece from a scrap piece of paper that I drew on. She absolutely loves cutting things out and is getting better and better at staying on the lines.

She got in some fine motor practice by ripping some yellow paper to create the straw hair. Once all her pieces were ready, she crinkled some paper and stuffed the bag. I then used a stapler to staple the top down.

She then used a glue stick and stuck all the parts on, including some googly eyes. I then finished it off by adding a mouth and patch on the hat with a sharpie.

These turned out even better than I had planned and are one of my new favorite things and will probably remain out well through Christmas and beyond.

The kids started out by stuffing the bags with some crumpled paper and we stapled the bottom closed. I then took the head and kind of twisted it a bit to create a bit of an indent to show the head and the thorax.

And then the process of painting began. Little Miss was completely engrossed in painting every last inch of her bag for an hour and a half. She was so peaceful and into this I barely heard a sound out of her and let’s just say that is not something that happens often in this house. Little Man painted quite a bit of his spider himself, as well as just about all of mommy’s hand and arm.

Once the spiders were dry, Little Miss glued on some eyes and then helped me add pipe cleaners for legs. We actually had this weird black fuzzy stuff laying around that worked perfectly for legs as well so we did one spider of each and they turned out super cool.

We topped it off by adding a bow and bowtie to them to make sure we knew which one was which as per Little Miss’ request.

We completed these last year and opted to paint real pumpkins this year. To created these you first need to stuff a brown paper bag with crumpled paper and then twist close. Wrap a green pipe cleaner around the stem and wrap it around a pencil to create a twirly vine. Use the stem to hold onto and then paint the bag with orange paint!!! Super easy and such a fun decoration for fall.

I cannot wait to pull these out year after year to display around our home. Nothing better than kid made art.