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Looking for lots of crafts made from recycled materials? You’ve come to the right place. I go beyond soup can pencil holders here. It is all about greening up your crafting and moving toward a more sustainable way of living. This site is full of eco-friendly crafts for children and adults. Making use (re-use really) of otherwise unwanted materials is good for the pocketbook and good for the environment.
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Recycle Your Cereal Boxes and More Into Pretty Paper Mosaics
Posted Mar 14, 10 -Filed Under children's crafts (recycled materials), crafts (recycled materials), reuse containers, ice cream, reuse books, reuse calendars, reuse clementine box, reuse magazines, reuse paper printed material
You probably have all the supplies you will need for this project right in your recycle bin. Cereal boxes and salvaged note book covers become art when cut into pieces and cleverly arranged.
How to tips:
Design your mosaic and sketch it lightly on a stiff piece of paper. I use foam board pieces and mat board scraps from a framing shop. These scrapes would otherwise be wasted. Call around to see what might be donated to you.
Save scrap paper (such as colored handouts form school, phone book covers, magazine pages…) or thin cardboard (such as cereal boxes, crackers and other food boxes, non-food boxes, notebook and coloring book covers…).
Cut the boxes in strips ½ inch thick. Focus on the parts with the most pure color. I like to use a paper cutter. More advanced students might want thinner strips in order to achieve finer details.
Here I have organized the scraps by setting ice cream containers into Clementine boxes.
Artists will cut up the strips to make their own mosaic tiles. It isn’t necessary to cut all the pieces in squares. Sometimes you will need more of a triangular shape to fill the space. Besides, you want to have a broken tile look.
Work one area at a time. Fill in the areas by gluing your “tiles” on one by one. Paste works well and is environmentally friendly. Glue sticks work nice but create a lot of plastic waste. If using white glue, I recommend using an old paint brush to apply the glue.
When done and the glue/ paste is dry, apply a layer of Modge Podge or an equivalent product.
*The butterfly mosaic above was a collaborative effort by young artists whose ages ranged from 6 to 11.
To see an example of a paper mosaic made from recycled thin cardboard such as cereal boxes, see my post: St. Patrick’s Day Rainbow Mosaic
Comments
5 Responses to “Recycle Your Cereal Boxes and More Into Pretty Paper Mosaics”
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these are lovely
did you know that butterfly wings are actually covered in tiny scales? i do a similar collage project with my preschoolers, and use the scales fact as a tie-in with nature science.
How is this eco-friendly? I need to know for a project haha?
[...] it’s pretty self explanatory how you would do this, but you can read the instructions on creating mosaics with cereal boxes to learn more. You could also use old magazines or even old photographs for this [...]
[...] Cereal Box Mosaics – Fun in the Making What a great green craft project! [...]
Hailey- “Recycling Cereal Boxes.”
How adorable. It gave me an idea for our proj, Thanks!