Why Don't You Make Magazine Butterflies?

Grab those magazines out of the recycling bin, we're making paper butterflies today!


With the sun peeking out from the behind clouds this morning, we opened up the windows and aired out the house. The first signs of spring are finally on the way; crocus bulbs pushing up through the ground, the sounds of birds chirping in the morning, the daylight slowly pushing the nightime back further and further.

After spending quality time with the chickens, turning the compost pile over, and raking up some wayward mulched leaves that escaped from the flower bed we came back inside for lunch and reading time. The Boy was oohing and awing over some gorgeous photos in a few of my favorite magazines and lamenting the fact that they always end up in the recycling bin. With spring fresh on my mind, I decided to usher her in a little earlier with some homemade magazine butterflies.

For this project you'll need:

Magazines with gorgeous colorful pages
Scissors
Ruler
Pipe Cleaner

I had The Boy pick out some of his favorite pages in the magazines. We carefully tore the pages out and put them in a pile.

Using our ruler and scissors, we drew two squares per page and then cut them out. One 4"x4" square and one 5"x5" square.


Fold each square accordion style, going from corner to corner on the diagonal. Your accordion folds shouldn't be too large - about 1/4" each. Each piece of paper will look like a fan.





Using your scissors, cut a regular sized pipe cleaner in half. We used black for our project, but you could use whatever color you like.

Face the pretty sides of the paper the same direction. Lay the smaller sized fan on top of the larger sized fan. Wrap the pipe cleaner around both pieces of paper and twist a few times to secure them. Gently curve the ends of the pipe cleaner down to form the antennae of the butterfly.


Carefully open your fans to reveal the wings of the butterfly. We found it helpful to pull the smaller wings up towards the antennae and the larger wings down before opening up the fan.


Now find someplace to display your butterflies! Using Glue Dots, we secured ours to our wall and mirror (A fantastic Etsy find made of recycled materials leftover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.)



I'm picturing many more of these - traveling the walls all over our house. Recycled materials repurposed into springtime beauty!


Cheers,
Simple Mama