I love making handprint crafts with kids, because I know that it will be fun to look back at how little their hands were. I’ve used paint to create handprint crafts several times, but it is a little tricky (and messy) dipping kids’ hands in paint. I wasn’t ambitious enough to tackle the prep and clean-up of paint, but still wanted to do a fun fall craft with my boys. Our fall wreath turned out cute and it is fun to look at the size difference of their hands. This would be a great gift for whoever is hosting your Thanksgiving!
What you need:
- Fall colored construction paper (red, brown, yellow, orange, etc.)
- Pencil
- Scissor
- Paper plate
- Glue or Spray Adhesive
Start with an array of fall-colored construction paper.
Place the child’s hands on the paper and trace around with a pencil. I wasn’t sure how my 1-year old would handle this, but he was very cooperative and thought it was pretty funny.
Use a scissors to cut out the handprints. If your child is a old enough they could help; my boys are a little young to be trusted with a scissors, so I cut while they kept themselves busy coloring on the extra construction paper.
Both boys did ten handprints, and I kept them in separate piles.
Next take a paper plate and cut out the middle of the plate with the scissors.
Next comes the glue. Using Elmer’s glue or rubber cement would work really well, I used spray adhesive and that worked great too. What is nice about spray adhesive is that you can spray the whole plate and quickly add the cut-out hands (I say “quickly” because you do have to work fast with spray adhesive, otherwise it will dry up and not stick). The downside of spray adhesive is that there is always quite a bit of overspray, so you definitely need to do it in a garage or outside.
I started placing my 2-year-old’s larger handprints around the entire paper plate.
It looked like this after I placed all 10 of the hands.
Next I placed my 1-year-old’s smaller handprints on the paper plate overlapping the first set of hands. Let it dry and hang it up on a door or window for a fun and welcoming decoration!