Chinese New Year Lions

The kids and I have been working on a great project for Chinese New Year. I designed a puppet that takes inspiration from Chinese New Year Lions. My family and I visit Chinatown in nearby NYC for the Chinese New Year celebrations and have followed the lions through the streets as they visit shops to collect small red envelopes and to give the shopkeepers their blessing.

It began with the idea of cutting a plastic plate in half and hinging it to make the mouth of the lion and it developed from there. Here we are creating the mouths and feet.

We created the bodies of the puppets with Smart-Fab who coincidentally were another exhibitor at convention. A little while back, they sent me some fabric to try and blog about. This was the first project I used it for. It's easy to cut, and we used tacky glue and hot glue guns to construct our projects. The Smart Fab stood up to it all. Thanks to the company for giving me an opportunity to try it out!

 And here are some of our final creations. It was hard to keep everyone still to take pictures! As you can see, I had a large age range and everyone was happy with this project! When I have older kids and younger kids together, the older ones always love to help the younger ones. It is a nice place to be. Not to mention that I even get to be in a picture!

Can you see all of the parts to construct these lions? A plastic plate, a plastic bowl, egg carton cups, paper tubes, and Smart-Fab. We used tissue squares and Mod Podge to cover the head, felt for the ears and tails, yarn, gems, pom poms, wiggle eyes, and jingle bells. I love this job! Enjoy.