To make a place mat craft, you will need a few basic items:
- Roll of contact paper
- Felt and other fabrics
- Acrylic paint
- Elmer’s Glue
- Construction paper
- Feathers
- Leaves
- Flowers
- Scissors
Let your imagination run wild with ideas and encourage your children’s creative ideas for making placemats, too. Think about your special events like birthdays and holidays. Design and construct placemats that reflect a particular theme, such as a birthday,and then you can use them for the special event. Here are some fun themed placemat craft ideas:
Valentine’s Day
For Valentines Day, use red felt to create a heart and glue it to a sheet of construction and then use pink felt or construction paper to cut smaller hearts out to decorate the main placemat. Your kids can decorate the hearts with different things like smaller hearts, paint, pictures and other craft accessories. Let them have fun making their heart-shaped placemat stand out. Be sure to write their name somewhere on the placemat along with the year as it is always fun to see how your children’s crafting abilities have grown and developed over the years. Once everything has been glued down with Elmer’s glue or a hot glue gun, use contact paper to secure everything and to protect it from water and other food sources. You will need a rolling pin to press the contact paper down onto the placemat and to remove any bubbles. Use scissors to trim the edges of the contact paper so they are even and your placemat is done! You can try adding a border to your placemat if you would like with some felt or ribbon around the edges.
Fourth of July
The Fourth of July is a wonderful, patriotic holiday where we celebrate our country and our freedom. Creating 4th of July placemats as you teach your children about this fun holiday is a great idea. Use black construction paper and have your children draw pictures of fireworks using metallic pens. You can also have them weave together an American flag by purchasing a pattern or you can download one. Encourage your children to be creative and have fun as they show you what this holiday means to them and allow them to represent it in their own way. You will need to use the contact paper again to secure everything and to keep moisture and other things away from the finished craft.
Seasonal Placemats
If you would like to create a single place mat that you can use for several months, have your children create a seasonal placemat. For fall for example, they can gather all different shapes, sizes and colors of leaves to use. Sort through the leaves and arrange them on a blank sheet of paper so your children can get an idea as to how they want their placemat to look. Then you will need to cut out a sheet of contact paper and take the backing off. Your children will then place their leaves on the sheet of contact paper in their desired order. Once they are done organizing it, place another sheet of contact paper over the top of the first one to secure the leaves in between the layers. Use a rolling pin or press firmly on the placemat to smooth out the bubbles. This is an easy placemat craft and it’s wonderful for young and old alike.