Hi everyone! Today’s craft tutorial is all about reducing, reusing and recycling! To create these adorable piggy banks, we are reusing several items from our Kiss Naturals Kits. These piggy banks can be customized into almost any animal and are a perfect way to introduce the concept of saving money to your kids.
*This tutorial is fairly advanced, so adult supervision is a MUST!*
Let’s get crafting!
Materials:
- An empty Kiss Naturals box
- Hot glue gun and a hot glue stick (and adult supervision!)
- A leftover measuring cup from your Kiss Naturals Kit
- Paint
- Paintbrushes
- A bowl
- Black permanent marker
- Scissors
- Fabric
- Ribbon (we used a red striped pattern but if you have any leftover fabric from a previous project that would work great as well! #reuse!)
How to Make Your Own Piggy Bank:
- Begin by taking your empty Kiss Naturals box apart at the seams. Cut off the big back panel.
- Paint the blank side the color(s) of your choice! In today's tutorial, we are making an elephant, so we chose to use a mix of blue and white paint. Allow 10-15 minutes for the paint to dry.
- Turn your cardboard over so that the painted side is face down. With the measuring cup upside down and placed as close to the center of the cardboard as possible, trace around the circumference with your black marker.
- Begin cutting strips towards the center, stopping at the line you just traced around the measuring cup. It should eventually resemble a sun and its rays!
- Hot-glue the measuring cup, upside down, to the line you traced, making sure the painted side is facing out.
- Pull each "sunray" (aka your paper strips) toward the center, hot-gluing the end of the strip to the bottom of your measuring cup. Remove any extra cardboard. Repeat this step until every "sunray" is glued down.
- Using your remaining Kiss Naturals box, remove one of the box flaps with scissors. Eyeballing it, cut the flap in half, lengthwise, so you have a strip which is about 8 inches long by 1 inch wide. Fold it into a ring and hot glue it closed. Glue the ring to the bottom of the elephant's head.
- Cut oval shapes out of your fabric to create the elephant's ears.
- Attach the ears with hot glue.
- Roll additional fabric into a tube and attach to the front, creating the elephant's trunk. Cut off any extra fabric so that your elephant's trunk isn't too long.
- Hot-glue your ribbon around the cardboard ring used as the neck of the elephant.
- Use any remaining cardboard scraps to cut eye shapes and any accessories like a bowtie. We created the bowtie by folding leftover ribbon and gluing a square of painted cardboard in the middle. If you’re creating a different animal for your piggy bank, get creative with the ears, nose, and accessories!
- Lastly, but most importantly, cut a slit at the top for your change to go into! Make sure the slit is smooth and large enough for even a quarter to fit.