Celebrate Lunar or Chinese New Year with your kids with this cool recycling project: make a toilet paper roll Chinese dragon craft. We love crafts, but we love them even more when there’s a chance to use up material that would otherwise end up in the trash.
This Lunar dragon toilet paper roll craft is fairly easy to make, although it does require decent scissor skills, so keep that in mind.
Once the craft is complete, you can also add a string and hang it; it will nicely swirl and dance in the air.
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You can do magic with toilet paper roll crafts, it’s such a common looking material that can be transformed into all kinds of wonderful works of art.
It’s shape just calls for being transformed into a Chinese dragon, doesn’t it?
How to Make the Toilet Paper Roll Chinese Dragon
What you need:
- toilet paper roll
- pencil
- scissors
- paint (red, yellow, and blue or other fitting colors)
- paintbrush
- glue stick
- color paper (red and yellow or other fitting colors)
- two googly eyes
Step by Step Tutorial
You will need a single toilet paper roll. As an alternative, you can also use paper kitchen towel rolls or even purchase paper rolls for making crafts with kids.
Paint the whole toilet paper roll. We painted ours red.
Wait for the paint to dry. You can have the kids just cut into it or draw a spiral around the paper roll with a pencil to use as a cutting guide.
Cut all the way around. Make one of the ends round.
This will be the head of this Chinese dragon craft.
You can leave the inside as is, or paint it as well.
Decorate the body of the dragon – you can have the kids paint a few dots. We made ours yellow, gold would look great as well.
Add a pair of googly eyes to the head.
Cut two tiny triangles from yellow paper and glue them above the eyes.
Then, have the kids cut a fire shape out of red paper.
And another similar, but smaller shape out of orange paper and a smaller out of yellow paper. Younger kids can just make one.
Have them glue these together.
Then, glue the fire under the head.
Cut a similar shape for the tail.
Cut a pair or two of legs out of yellow paper and glue them to the body.
The Chinese dragon toilet paper roll craft is complete!
Do you like how it turned out?
We sure do!
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