Toilet Paper Roll Art Projects

One day, Rachel told me she was saving a few toilet paper rolls, because "you never know when they'll be good for something with the kids."

So I took that idea, and drew 4 Sesame Street characters on them one day.  They were a huge hit, and Ben in particular liked to "wear" them like little gaudy cardboard wristbands, as he went around playing with other things.  So I did a few more, and Maggie enjoyed planning which character would be next.  

One day, she called out to me from the bathroom, holding an empty toilet paper roll, but instead of "Daddy, we need more toilet paper!" she excitedly said "Daddy, look!  The Count!" (our next planned character that day)  They have never seen an episode of Sesame Street, so this is good American education.

This led to the second project.  We love advent, but had neither wreath nor calendar this year.  So we asked our neighbors to save their rolls, and throughout advent, I would create characters from the Bible, and we would use them as props to tell various parts of the Christmas story.  We started with the Annunciation with just Mary, Joseph, and Gabriel.  Then we added an innkeeper and a donkey, and so on.  The kids really enjoyed it, and here was the finished ensemble: 

Over the holidays, my aunt and uncle gave Maggie and Ben a HUGE sticker book with Thomas the train characters and even stickers of rails and props for making your own tracks.  So, on returning to France (since the rolls keep coming, after all), we took to taping the stickers onto the rolls, and one afternoon made a map of Sodor on the back of an old poster.  Both kids enjoy it a lot.  One of Maggie's favorite activities is to line the engines up and flip the poster over to use as a "blanket" to put the engines down for their naps. 

We have a LOT of toilet paper rolls all over our house now...

Felt fairly creative until we visited a friend here who is making a to-scale model of the nearby chateau out of...gingerbread.  Very detailed and pretty awe-inspiring.