This idea for contact paper art is the result of my 5-year-old’s love of scissors. She sat listening to an audio book last week, all the while cutting away at a pack of drinking straws with her scissors. I’m not quite sure what it is about snipping she finds so appealing but she loves it at the moment and will cut paper, playdough, card, whatever. Not wanting to put a stop to her current craze, but also not wanting to see all our art supplies vanish into pieces quite so quickly, we gathered up all the drinking straw remnants to use for some contact paper art.
Contact paper art

We decided to make some frames from card and drew out some irregular shapes.

Once the frames were cut out we placed them onto contact paper (which you might also know as sticky backed plastic).

Then it was time to fill in our gallery with the drinking straws.

Putting the contact paper frames up in the window, with the light shining through, creates a beautiful effect. With the bowl of drinking straws placed on the window ledge it’s an invitation for whoever is passing to add a few pieces. The contact paper is strong enough to hold the straws in place, but it’s very easy to peel them off, move them around and try different arrangements.

You can fill in the whole frame, make faces, create a stained glass effect, make stripes, patchwork, whatever you like. Have you ever tried contact paper art with your kids?
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happily shared with friday’s nature table and it’s playtime and kids get crafty











































I love your use of straws for this activity!
Pinned to my quick & easy crafts board =)
Fun! And a great way to “use up all those straws”, my son adores cutting them up.. wonder what it is about them!
Thank you for sharing on Kids Get Crafty!
Maggy
What a fun idea! I am a Sunday School teacher, and some of my younger students also love scissor work, they will just happily snip away while listening to stories. I will have pin this to my crafts page, great idea!
Fabulous!!
[...] super frugal material for us as they’d already been used for scissor practise and making some contact paper art – but how would the kids use it with playdough? It’s always interesting to offer a new [...]
Excellent fine motor idea–thx!
[...] this month. (And if you love the idea of making art with drinking straws, you might like to try this contact paper art idea) Colours, Creative / Art, Kids Art Explorers, Painting kids art explorers [...]
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[...] Nurture Store’s post here has some fun ideas for “framing” the Contact paper art. [...]