Home - Crafty Bug Pom Pom Kits - Hints & Tips:
Tips to Make Our Crafty Bugs
Our unique crafty bug children's craft kits are really popular with kids for both home and group craft sessions.
The kits cover all of the popular themes, including princess crafts, pirate crafts, sealife crafts and butterfly crafts for kids. However, we also sell some kits covering some more unusual themes, such as tennis, weddings and birthday crafts.
Instructions for these kits aren't really necessary. However, all of our packs include an image of the finished craft as a guide for the crafters in case some guidance is needed. In addition, we have included some tips and hints below to enable you to get the best from your children's crafty bug craft kits.
Feet First!
We always start by making the feet.
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Draw a large heart shape on the foam square, a pencil is best for this.
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Use scissors to cut the heart out.
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The pointed end of the heart should then be rounded off with the scissors.
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In case there's any pencil outline left, use this side as the underneath of the feet!
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It's also a good idea to write names on the bottom of the feet at this stage if you are making these in a group craft session.
Pom Poms
To help the body pom pom to stick to the feet, use scissors to give the pom pom a haircut on one side - just a trim though!
Not only will it help the pom pom stick, it will stop it rolling off the feet before the glue dries.
The end result will also look better.....
Get Sticky!
To attach eyes, noses, antlers, ears etc, put a small spot of glue onto the body pom pom, where you want the little bits to go, rather than putting the glue on the small pieces. This is far easier as little hands won't be trying to transfer gluey items from their gluey fingers!
Exposing glue (especially fast or high tack glues) to the air momentarily before joining parts together improves the speed of bonding..........
PVA glue is not a particularly fast drying adhesive, which is why it's used in kids crafts. If you use standard PVA, we suggest time is allowed before the bugs are moved, packed in party bags etc.
If the bug has attachments, such as a hat, sword, wand, beard etc, it helps to lean it against something until the glue dries.
THIS GLUE is our favourite and we recommend this for all bug making projects. It is a "tacky" PVA and holds the parts together much easier than normal PVA and dries quicker too.
Spiral Hats
We love these spiral hats but without some guidance they can be a bit tricky for kids.
Truthfully, it's very simple though!
Just wind a chenille stem tightly around a pencil.
Slide it off.
Then all you need to do is tease it into shape.
Simple!
Die Cut Card Shapes
Some of our bugs have die-cut card shapes in them. These may be hands, heads or body shapes.
To fix these to the poms, push them gently out of the die cut frame - scissors are not necessary.
If they need colouring in or embellishing, do this before attaching to the pom pom body.
Then gently part the pom pom so that you can see the centre of the pom.
Add a blob of glue into the centre of the pom and then place the die cut shpe around the core of the pom, fluffing the pom pom back up when finished.
The Range
We have a terrific and growing range of these kids crafty bug kits, packed for both individuals and groups.
Please click one of the headings below to see more....
Crafty Rocker Bugs
Our crafty rocker bugs have been designed in the style of "rocking horses", rocking from side to side when assembled.
These are an extremely simple idea but are very effective and kids love them. The bases can be decorated as name place cards, with sentiments to give as gifts, with themed images or with craft supplies from your craft box.
They are made the same way as our other crafty bugs but instead of a foam base or feet they have a card rocker. This is a circle of card, which is simply folded in half, with the pom pom body being attached to the top. The folded edge of the card disc should be inserted into the pom pom core, in the same way as the die-cut pieces are - see above for details.
When attaching the pom pom, make sure you get this in the middle of the rocker so that it is balanced and will rock evenly.
The image above shows a completed selection of our crafty rocker bugs, with the bases having been embellished in different ways. We have deliberately not included anything to decorate the bases, to enable these to be used in any way you wish. You could embellish them with fel tip pens (gel pens on darker backgrounds), sequins, glitter glue, stickers and almost anything else from your craft box. We would suggest that the bases are decorated BEFORE the pom poms are added to them, it's almost impossible afterwards!
To view our range of crafty rocker bugs, please CLICK HERE.
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