Popsicle sticks – Got Meghan's Blog

Today I am back with my second DIY post for this month! If you haven’t seen last week’s post, it was called “Candy Corn Banner” and you can check out the instructions on how to make your own banner!

This craft, we got started on it the same day we did the banner. Despite the fact that we were both losing energy, we were both positive and very creative that we thought we’d end up finishing both projects in one day! I still think it was accomplishment that we were able to get the first steps completed and the day I came back to her house we finished the rest of it and made a few more characters!

Again, I found this one on Pinterest but unlike the banner where it was just one link, people make crafts with Popsicle sticks all the time so there’s a mass quantities of them all over the site! However, I will include the one that gave me the idea to help you out, but everything was really simple!

What you will need for this:

Popsicle sticks
Paint
Glue
Paintbrushes
Paper Plates
Napkins

Most that we used for these guys my nana already had in her “craft drawer” and yes, she has one of those and it’s glorious! Anyways, in the original link they used only five sticks for the characters but I honestly can’t create a whole face in that amount of room so we upped the number to eleven sticks. We lined the sticks side-by-side to make a little fence.

After we figured that out and counted multiple times to make sure we had the right amount of sticks we got started on getting them to stay together. We used a glittery Elmer’s glue that kept drying up on us everytime we tried to use it. My poor nana had so much trouble that she ended up having to take off the cap and actually paint on the glue on the sticks! Surprisingly, that worked a lot better than we thought it would!

We ended up stopping on the project to finish the banner, so I can’t exactly tell you how long it took for it to dry completely, but it wasn’t that long! I want to say less than five minutes!

I wanted to really give myself room to be creative considering my nana was the one who had to do the beginning steps. So I decided to draw out the characters on a pieces of paper, I made a vampire, Frankenstein, witch, ghost, etc. I just wanted an outline of what I wanted on these canvases. I had my nana measure out the fences and they came out to be 4×1/2 by 4×1/2 and then I had my dad take those measurements and make me four squares on my ole sketch pad.

When I went to actually draw anything, everything literally went to hell. I am an artist, but I’ve sort of been in retirement for the last 4 or 5 years and apparently parts of me like the status and when I started to draw out a witch, I basically tore myself down.. It was awful! Anyways, I had to find a new way to go about this so I treated it like I was coloring as that doesn’t bother me as much! And I started coloring a witch, and somehow I made what looks like a cross between a warlock and a Frankenstein monster!

The next day I went back to my nana’s and added another DIY “experiment” to this project! I went on Pinterest to find a way to make homemade paints and I found one, but I will not deny, it is a pain in the butt because you only get the recipe. There’s nothing about getting the lumps out or how long to let it rest. So that part became the actual “experiment” but it was sort of a success! The day after my dad bought us some new paints so we no longer had to use the homemade paint, which is the reason why I’m not including the recipe in this post!

To finish our pumpkins, we didn’t necessarily know what would be easier for us to do as far as the faces went, so she drew out the eyes and nose on hers but I had to figure out a mouth and I went with the standard buck teeth; she did pretty good with this and I ended up doing the same thing but did my eyes differently. She also wanted to add “hair” onto her pumpkin. She originally was going to glue orange yarn, but we both thought it was too much orange so she used a last bit of black glitter for the hair and now he’s very cute!

I decided to do two more, well at least get started on two others. After I finished my Jack O’ Lantern, that I’ve named “Jackie” I moved on to my next character! I still wanted to try for a witch so I painted a fence in a limeade green and while I let it dry I painted another fence white. For this fence, I decided to go freehand or in this case, “freefoot” and didn’t make an outline of the face. I made the mouth first and then worked my way up! It looked so cute, I was very proud of myself by the end of it!

I let it dry before I moved onto the next stage, which was doing the iris of the eyes. After that, I realized that I didn’t have enough room for the cap and I made a last minute decision to make it a Frankenstein monster, so I made a small hairline and luckily I had the ends of the sticks on the back showing so I painted those areas in black and lastly I added a lavender pupil so he still looked silly, unlike the scary monster I had pictured into my mind! His name is “Frankie” if you wanted to know!

We officially finished the craft the next day, but I felt if I added any more onto this post, nobody would want to read it. So that’s why I’ve decided to stop here! If you would like to see any others, go check out my Facebook page! I posted some sneak peeks!

Hope you all have enjoyed these posts! 🙂

What do you think of our fence characters? Who is your favorite?