Garden Center How To - Watering Cans

Welcome to the tutorial on How To Make Watering Cans! See the full Garden Center here.

You will need:

• A cup (we used styrofoam)
• A circle of cardboard that fits over the mouth of the cup, for the base.
• A long piece of corrugated cardboard, for the handle.
• A piece of cardstock rolled and glued into a tube, for the spout.

First cut off  the bottom 1/2" to 3/4" (depending on the size of your cup) of the cup. Save this piece.

Next make radial cuts in the spot where you will insert the spout

and insert the spout. Notice that the cup is upside down. If necessary, tape the inserted portion of the spout to the inner wall of the cup to stabilize it. 

Attach the handle. Glue one end close to the bottom of the watering can, on the opposite side as the spout.

Glue the other end below the rim of the watering can, above the spout.

Make slits in the tip of the spout and press open the tabs

and glue them to the inside of the cup-bottom you saved from the first step.

Finally, glue on the cardboard base of the watering can.

Here's the finished watering can:

Here are the kids decorating them with permanent markers.

Don't forget to make dots on the sprinkler head for water holes!

Here are the finished watering cans - the kids really, really liked this part of the project. But then, they've always liked decorating anything 3D.

Now go water some flowers!

Next up: Pests! Ick.

Garden Center How To - Flowers

Welcome to the tutorial on How To Make Pop-Up Flowers (and their distant cousins, the Bendy-Straw Flowers That Don't Do Anything). See the full Garden Center here.

You can find variations of these flower crafts all over the internet. The main draw (ooh, pun!) of this activity is the coloring. Children of any age can do this bit. And because the flowers are cut out along their outlines, even messy coloring-outside-the-lines will work. While the kids are contentedly coloring, you can assemble the other parts.

First, draw flowers on cardstock. You can use paper, but cardstock holds up better.

For the Bendy-Straw Flowers That Don't Do Anything, just glue the finished flowers onto the ends of the straws. We slit the straw tips and slotted the flowers in before gluing them.

 

You might even want to make some of these in double-layer, so you can sandwich the stems between them. Here we left a bridge of card/paper connecting both sides of the flower, just to help with alignment when we pair them up later.

To make the pop-up flowers, you'll need

• A paper or plastic cup
• A circle of fabric for the dirt - the diameter is roughly twice that of the cup's mouth
• A straw or dowel or stick
• Some leaf shapes - we used fabric
• A double-layer flower

First, make a hole in the bottom of the cup large enough for the straw to pass through unhindered.

Then poke (do not cut) the tiniest hole you can in the center of the fabric circle and insert the straw. 

Glue the fabric around the straw. Exactly where on the straw to position the fabric depends on how long your straw is with respect to the depth of your cup. You might want to experiment a bit, but we found that about half-way down is suitable. Glue on the leaves.

Apply glue on the wrong side of the flower shapes and sandwich the tip of the straw between them. 

Then apply a ring of glue along the inside of the cup. Again the position of the glue ring depends on the depth of the cup with respect to the length of your straw, so be prepared to experiment. Ours was about half-way down.

Insert the straw into the hole in the cup case, and stick the edge of the fabric circle to the ring of glue. Some of the circumference will remain unattached but that's OK. 

You should be able to squish the flower right down by lowering the straw

 and pop the flower right up by raising the straw.

Here's that old project (again) that offers an alternative to pot planting - a foam dirt bed.

Next up: the watering cans!

Garden Center!

Warning to larvaphobes: contains gross photos of fake caterpillars!!!!!!

Our girls adore flowers, gardening and worms. Plant nurseries, garden centers, farms, butterfly gardens - they love them all. They were my motivation to make that dirt project some time back - till this day, it remains one of their most beloved toys. And with winter finally behind us, we've been visiting our favorite garden center a lot - it's gorgeous and about the size of a small city. 

The girls are entranced by this place - the colors, the smells, the shelves of anything from living plants to gardening books to rubber gloves to ornaments, and riding on the open wagons from building to building, taking everything in. Naturally, they are now suddenly very interested in the trade of plants and their associated accessories. And they've gathered all the paper, plastic and felt flowers in the house and opened florist shops, been flower-peddlars-on-foot and sold bouquets, farmer's market-style. So last weekend, to fuel their frenzy, we made  our own garden center. 

There were seed packets

with instructions for the er...layest of laymen,

 and fertilizer.

There were watering cans

to irrigate potted flowers

so they would grow tall and strong.

There were fruit trees

all ready for harvest.

There were garden tools, like shovels (we call them spades):

And for the vile bugs that terrorize plants and gardeners everywhere,

we stocked bug spray.

Also weed-killer for those other kinds of plant pests:

The girls and I spent two happy days putting all these together. There was so much to invent, color, cut out, fill, glue, roll, string and sort. 

Everyone had something to do and make - more challenging stuff for the older ones, and simpler projects for the littles-

and coloring by all, at all their different skill levels.

Any project that involves coloring is a hit in our house, especially if those projects are 3D sorts.

We'll be sharing how we made our garden center in the following posts:
Pop-up potted flowers
Watering Cans
Caterpillars, Pesticides and Weedkiller
Seed Packets


Want more play scenarios? Check out

Vet Clinic

Art Museum

Automobiles from Busytown