Caroline
Y’all know by now how much I love a good children’s craft!! When Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store contacted me about their Cape Discovery Summer Craft Challenge, you can imagine how excited I was to get my hands on one of their fun projects and start creating with my kids.
The project I chose to replicate with my children was the Pop Up Lion Book. Not only did the lion look absolutely darling, but I loved how it would give my children an opportunity to use their creativity by writing a story. Plus, creating your own pop up book is just the coolest thing ever!! 🙂
To make your own pop up book, you can buy this Create Your Own Pop Up Books kit from Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store. It includes 2 hard cover books with markers, stickers and little accessories to help you create your pop up designs throughout the books.
The directions themselves didn’t include too many different ideas for using all of the pop-up features in the book, so we put on our brainstorming caps thinking of different ways we could utilize each page and my son wrote a story titled “The First Time I Went to the Zoo”. I’m excited to show you how darling the book turned out.
“The First time I went to the zoo, I saw a toucan flying right beside me. He was playing with his toucan friends.”
The neat thing about this feature in the book is that you can use your finger to move around the paper strips which makes the birds look as if they are really flying around you.
“When I walked by the lion cage, I got a little scared.”
The lion proved to be a bit tricky to create, but these directions found at Jo-Ann’s website helped some. Make sure to use construction paper when making the lion as cardstock paper would be too thick to work with the book.
We cut a heart shaped face for the lion to match the pop up section at the top of the page. After we cut it out, we used it as a template to help make the mane around his face. I made the mane in two separate sections. I traced half of the heart-shaped face on an orange sheet of construction paper and cut it out making it about 2 inches larger all the way around. I did this for the other side as well.
After gluing the mane and face on to the pop up book, we cut out yellow ears, a brown nose, a pink mouth with white sharp teeth (my boys insisted!) and glued them onto the lion. Lastly we added large wiggly eyes (the kit only included small wiggly eyes, so we used some of our own) and drew on his whiskers with a black marker (included in the kit).
“The gorillas didn’t frighten me at all. They made funny noises like Ooh Ooh Ahh Ahh!”
Probably one of my most favorite pages!! My boys both drew and colored gorillas and we glued the bigger one on the pop out section so it looked liked it was sitting right in front of you and the smaller gorilla up in a tree. My son added the branches and leaves at the bottom of the page to make it look more like their environment.
“When I passed by the snake he was hissing at me. Maybe he was hungry.”
The curly strips included in the kit make perfect snakes. We had trouble with the snakes attaching to both sides of the page with the sticky section provided on them, so we used glue dots to attach the snakes to our book. Notice the gray rock on the page with the little pink tail sticking out…Flip it down to reveal the snake’s dinner. My kids thought that was super clever! The folded half circle was included in the kit to use in your pop up design.
“They say that the tortoise is hundreds of years old.”
My son came up with this design on all his own. So proud of him! He drew the tortoise body and legs around the pop out and colored them in with crayon. I cut hexagon shapes out of green and brown construction paper and we glued them around the shell of the tortoise. Lastly we added wiggly eyes on the pop out sections above the tortoise face.
He turned out sooooo cute!!
“I had a dazzling day at the zoo and a blast looking at the animals.”
On the last page we decided it would be fun to add a picture of my boys at the zoo when they were little. Sweet memories!!
I wanted to mention that I used water colors for the backgrounds of all of our pages. This wouldn’t be recommended by the kit since it could saturate the pages and ruin your book. I really wanted the water color effect though so I painted one page at a time, as lightly as possible, and then immediately set it out in the sun to dry quickly. Our pages are a tiny bit wavy from the water colors (so beware!), but we are still happy with how they turned out.
Make sure to check out the Jo-Ann Spring Catalog for more great projects to complete with your children this summer. Also, don’t forget to sign up to be a Jo-Ann preferred customer. You’ll receive a 20% off coupon and notice of great sales and coupons.
Joann’s is having a Pinterest contest for all participating crafters, so I would love it if you would pin our side-by-side picture with the hashtag #summerofjoann. We would be so excited to win the gift card prize!!
Thanks for stopping by! Hope you are already having a great time crafting with your children this summer!!
