Paper Cup Animals – easy crafts with children

I’ve done lots of crafts with paper plates lately so why not branch out I thought… to paper cups!

There are lots of crafts you can do with plastic or paper cups so if you’ve bought the disposable kind for a party for example and have some left over, this is a great way to use them. I don’t buy single use cups at all for using at home to actually drink out of – I actually bought a small pack of eight purely for crafting purposes!

So what can you make using a paper cup with toddlers? All sorts of things… but in this case I’ve gone with an assortment of paper cup animals.

We made all four of these at once over a couple of days (to allow time for paint to dry), and gave them to various people as gifts, apart from the cat which Sophie wanted to keep herself!

The designs are not my own apart from the cat; the ideas actually came from different blogs and websites: the fox came from Kids’ Craft Room, the squirrel is from the Pinterested Mum, and the dog is from Tips from a Typical Mom.

They are all really easy to make and you can adapt the designs to make all kinds of other animals – I’m thinking maybe zoo animals next time!

We began by painting four paper cups – you need to use paper ones for this, not plastic. My daughter was easily able to do the painting then we left the cups to dry. She did two brown and two orange.

While the paint was drying I cut out different elements for each animal’s features. For example eyes, ears and feet. 

To make the fox you need:

• Glue
• Double sided sticky tape
• Paper cup painted orange
• Tail – made from a piece of card painted orange, cut into an oval shape with a shaped piece of white paper glued onto one end
• Triangle shape with ears for the head, cut out of card painted orange. We stuck small pieces of white paper on it to create the white areas on the face. 
• Black pen or piece of black paper or card to make the nose
• Stick on eyes – you can also draw these on with a pen
• White paper oval for the fox’s body/ stomach 
• Two feet made of card painted orange, with detail added with pen. You can’t see from the picture but the feet have tabs which are stuck with double sided sticky tape to the inside of the cup

My daughter had great fun assembling all these parts – she stuck the eyes onto the face and the face onto the front and the tail onto the back and so on. I helped with some of the smaller parts but she was very proud of herself!

For the squirrel you need:

• Glue
• Double sided sticky tape
• Paper cup painted orange
• Tail made from paper card painted orange, cut into a long tail shape and curled at the top
• Triangles made from orange card for ears
• Nose and teeth made from white card and pen
• Stick on eyes (or you can make them from card and pen)
• White paper for body / stomach
• Feet made from brown card with pen detail

For the cat you need:

• Glue
• Double sided sticky tape
• Paper cup painted brown
• Ears made from brown paper with pink pen detail
• Stick on eyes (or you can make them from card and pen)
• Nose, mouth and whiskers made from paper with pen detail
• Feet made from brown paper or card with pen detail

For the dog you need:

• Glue
• Double sided sticky tape
• Paper cup painted brown 
• Stick on eyes or ones made from card and pen
• Nose made from brown paper and pen
• Large ears made from brown paper
• Feet made from brown paper and pen

My daughter loved making these and I’m proud of how much she did of them by herself – and they made really cute gifts!