Egg Box Bats!

I have well and truly missed the boat with this one! But I figure I already have the photos so I might as well do the post, if nothing else it will remind me to do them (better) next year! I found the idea on Happy Clippings via Pinterest, their bats are a million times better than our ones but ours still looked great hung around the playroom/dining room in the run up to Halloween. And Poppet really loved making them. She likes bats because of the one that features in the Julia Donaldson book 'Monkey Puzzle' so was excited to be making a bat. And she made them entirely herself apart from I cut the wings outs (despite her cries of "I do it mum!")

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 To make them you need:

• egg boxes
• ribbon (in halloween colours preferably so orange or black, I didn't have any so we used gold and lime green)
• black paint
• a skewer/pencil/something to make a hole
• goggly eyes 

However I stumbled into difficulties pretty early on in proceedings when I realised we didn't have any black paint so was debating bundling the girls into the pushchair to make an emergency dash to the shops (we have a lot of these type of 'emergencies'). This sounded really unappealing and somewhere in the depths of my mind I seemed to recall that you can make black paint but I have never been good at that colour mixing malarky, I can just about remember that blue and yellow makes green and that is it. So a quick check with my good friend Google revealed that indeed, you can make black paint by mixing equal quantities of blue, yellow and red.

So we did that and as if by magic, black appeared! Poppet was as impressed by this as I was. I cut the egg boxes into 3 cup sections, and trimmed them so they would sit flat on the table. Then I cut 'wing shapes' from the two outer cups (n.b. could do better). Poppet's job was then to cover them in black paint which she did happily. We should have done the inside of them too but didn't think of it at the time.

We had some black paint left over so to use it up Poppet did some black handprints to look like a spider. You have to paint your hand black but not the thumb, so your spider has 8 legs. She really liked doing this. We added goggly eyes to the finished spider and cut him out and hung him up on a ribbon as well but I didn't get a photo of this so you will need to take my word for it.

Once the bats are dry (or, if you are like us, still tacky but you are too impatient to wait any longer), stick on some eyes and then make a hole in the top to hang them from. Poppet insisted she make the holes so under my supervision she carefully pushed the skewer through the tops.

And then carefully threaded a piece of ribbon through it (all great for fine motor skills/hand eye coordination!). I knotted the end for her a few times to keep the ribbon from falling out and our bats were finished! We made three in all, and they have now been packed away for next Halloween but only this morning Poppet was asking "where my bats gone?". 

Poppet: 2yrs 9 mos

Little: 1yr 1 mos