How to Make a Class Giraffe

 

Meet Our Class Giraffe

It’s a new year and a fresh beginning! I know I haven’t been blogging much (or any) over the last few years…….things just got too busy with 3 little kiddos and working full time :-) I’ve decided though to give it another try and we’ll see how we go. I’m quite rusty though on both blog writing AND uploading pictures and posts so I’m hoping it will all come back to me pretty quickly.

For the last two years, I had a camping theme in my Kinder room. It was a lot of fun and the kids loved it but I felt like it was time for a change. I wanted something that wasn’t going to be too hard to change and I wanted to keep the fun tree I made in my reading room a few years ago…………..so I decided that the theme is SAFARI.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be showing you snippets of my room and the set up but today I wanted to share with you the giraffe that my hubs and I made on Sunday. It pretty much took a day to build but it wasn’t hard or expensive. I will say though that I come up with the ideas and my hubs is the man that makes them happen……I’m blessed!

 Ok, to start off with, we had a few boxes and pool noodles in our garage that we knew we could use. We just taped the box up a bit to make it a little sturdy and we had a thick dowel that we put into the pool noodle (as this is the head and we didn’t want it flopping around).

We did the same for the 4 legs only we used PVC pipe (much cheaper!).

We also found these things (I have no idea what they are) in the PVC section of Masters that were perfect for the hooves (and also less than $3 each). We cut holes in the bottom of the box (only large enough for the PVC pipe) and we hot glued the neck inside the box.

The guy at Masters told us that the spray paint might eat through the pool noodle, so we covered everything in masking tape and used some rolled up bits of paper to make the knees and little bit knobbly. We sprayed the hooves black and everything else yellow. We gave the legs 1 coat of spray but the boxes and the neck we sprayed twice.

While all of that was outside sun-baking, I painted spots onto thick cardboard plates. I used copper and brown acrylic paint and then outlined them with a sharpie.

After it had dried, we used a lot glue gun to glue brown felt to make the “mane”. We also hot glued the spots onto the body. I drew and painted spots (using the same paint) on each of the legs. They needed two coats to cover the yellow spray paint.

We found these little stopper things (also in the PVC pipe section), sprayed those black and used them for eyes. On top of that, we hot glued 2 glass stones and a button for the eyes. The eyelashes are made from the left over bits of cardboard from the spots. I had some cute orange fabric, so we used that for the hair. We also found a packet of these cheap balls from the dollar store and hot glued them onto the top. I painted them with the acrylic paint I used for the spots.

 

I’m a bit of a cheeks fan so I had to glue some of those on to make it a little bit whimsical :-) The ears were made from a laminated sheet (To make it stiff) and brown felt.

We had to be able to transport it to school (it is well over 7 feet tall) so the head came off and the legs we put on at school.

It looks sooooo cute in the corner of my room! I can’t WAIT for the kiddos to see it in a few weeks……..meanwhile, we’ve also been working on a cave……..