Pretty Peacocks

I've done peacock crafts in the past (here and here) and loved them, but I wanted to try something different this year. If you remember my turkey craft from tissue boxes, I said I was saving the blue boxes for peacocks. I loved the design.

For this craft I cut really long rounded feathers, which means I didn't get as many feathers from each box as I had hoped. So I also cut some feathers from construction paper. First the kids glued the feathers onto a semi-circle.

Then they dipped their thumb in glue and made prints on the feathers. I received some teal glitter from CraftProjectIdeas.com and sprinkled it on the glue prints. It was the perfect finishing touch.

The body of the peacock was made the same as the other crafts.

Blue cocktail toothpicks were added to the head for the crest and the body was glued onto the feathers.

The kids didn't fill out their peacocks the way I did, so I probably would have had enough tissue box feathers, but I like the mixture anyway.

Fun Fact: The train of a peacock can be up to six feet long!

Glittery Peacocks

This is just a short post to show you our peacocks. We made them almost the exact same way we did last year, so if you want more information, go here.

We did, however, do a couple things differently. Instead of having the kids color the coffee filter with markers, they used droppers and colored water.

I used the colors from my neon pack of food coloring. The kids squirted the water over the filter.

We let them dry overnight. We made the body of the peacock the same (my typical bowling pin-shaped body, neon wiggle eyes, cocktail toothpicks for the crest, a beak and feet). But for some reason I decided to make black beaks. I was getting sick of my orange beaks and peacock beaks are grayish anyway. I didn't have gray, so I went with black. I also made brown feet. The kids made the eyespots the same as last year, by dipping their thumb in paint and making prints on the coffee filter. And finally the body was glued to the filter. Now here's where we changed things up again. Instead of making the smaller dot in the eyespot with paint, we used glue. The kids dipped their finger in glue,

then they pressed it inside the painted spots.

We started with pinkies, but ended up just using the index finger because it was easier. After all the glue spots were on, the kids chose a color of glitter and sprinkled it over the glue.

(I should say I sprinkled the glitter. I knew we only needed a little bit, and I also know kids like to dump glitter. So I did this part to avoid a huge mess.) Finally, we shook off the extra glitter and we had a beautiful peacock!

They turned out so lovely. I can't wait to hang them up!

UPDATE: Here they are hanging in the hall, with the words, "Friends of a feather flock together."

Fun Fact: A peacock's train can be several feet long, but is shed every year.

Peacocks

Another bird we learned about this week was the peacock. The art project was so cute. First the kids colored a coffee filter with markers and I sprayed them with water. While that was drying, they put together the body. I just cut one free-hand. It reminds me of a short bowling pin. They glued on a beak and eyes and picked out some cocktail toothpicks for the crest. Those are taped on the back of the head.

When the coffee filter was dry, they glued the body to it. Then they picked out two colors of paint for the eyespots on the feathers. In one color, they dipped in their thumb and made thumb prints on the coffee filter around the peacock body. In the other color they dipped in their pinky and made pinky prints inside the thumb prints. I got the idea for the fingerprint eyespots from DLTK.

In the past I've also had legs available for them to glue on, but I didn't do it this year.

And that's our peacock craft! What do you think?

Fun Fact: Peafowl are among the largest birds that can fly. The males are peacocks, the females are peahens, and the babies are peachicks.