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June 14 is National Flag Day and with the 4th of July around the corner, a frugal flag craft is perfect. We had already started thinking about 4th of July crafts and what we could make in the coming weeks, so when I realized it was Flag Day we decided to craft a flag.
Here’s what we started with…
I have been stockpiling these toilet paper and paper towel rolls for a while. And, this particular stash was starting to border on a serious cardboard hoard.
So, I was so glad when I got the idea to make this project. I hate to throw anything like this away because, like today, inspiration will strike and I’ll know just what to do with that pile of junk craft supplies taking over the house.
Besides, one girl’s trash is this girl’s craft project.
Even if it’s toilet paper rolls.
Flag Craft Supplies
We made an easy and (couldn’t be more) budget-friendly flag craft with some cardboard and red, white, and blue paint.
Here’s what you need for supplies:
1. Paper towel, toilet paper tubes, or both.
2. Red, white, and blue paint and paintbrushes or you could use markers or crayons too. But paint just seemed quicker and since we had quite a few to do we went with that.
3. Some string or yarn to tie the tubes together after letting the paint dry.
Then, get your kiddos to paint those tubes.
We had some white ones already so we didn’t have to paint all of them. Our flag only has 11 rows because that’s all the tubes we had. But, we talked about how the actual flag has 13 to represent the original 13 colonies.
We were able to get all 50 stars on the blue tubes. We made a star stamp out of a piece of pool noodle we had cut for another project. I drew a star shape on it and cut away the foam around the star so we could use it to stamp the tubes. It worked great.
Flag Craft Assembly
Next, we grabbed some yarn we had in our craft stash to start piecing it together.
We used a hole punch to put a hole in the first and last tube of each row and strung the tubes together in rows layer by layer.
We strung each row separately because it seemed like the easiest way. It would have been hard to get the tubes to look right if I tried to attach each tube to the one below it.
The toilet paper tubes were different sizes, but I didn’t mind if they weren’t perfectly even. I tend to really like the imperfections in our homemade projects. I did cut a few smaller tubes to add to the blue rows though because if I didn’t it would have been much shorter than the others and been obvious because of the color change.
Then, we hung it up as art in our hallway.
It took both my husband and me to hang it up because the tubes are a bit temperamental and tend to roll around. I taped down the string at both ends of the rows of tubes and a few pieces in the middle here and there to better hold it up.
As we were putting it up we realized it looked like it was actually waving. Some tubes stick out more than others and the edge is uneven and appears to be blowing in the wind. Super cool accidental outcome!
It’s a festive decoration for us to have up with the 4th just around the corner and a great way to use up a stockpile of cardboard tubes.
What do you use your toilet paper tubes and paper towel rolls for?
Let me know if you try this project.
Thanks for reading,
Heidi
