Make a Chinese firecracker garland

Traditionally, firecrackers are let off each Chinese New year to warn away the man-eating monster Nian. Make your own Chinese ‘firecrackers’ out of toilet rolls and create a traditional Chinese garland this year.

What you need:

• 10 or more toilet rolls
• Red and gold paint
• 1 x paper plate
• 1m of red ribbon
• red paper (wrapping paper is ideal)
• gold cellophane (yellow paper will also do)
• sticky tape
• scissors
• stapler

Number of players:

Activity:

Paint the paper plate red, this will be the head of your garland.

Set it aside to dry and while it’s drying …

Wrap each toilet roll in red and gold paper; a red layer on top with a gold layer beneath that is slightly bigger to create an edge of gold. (See video.)

Now get your red paper plate and embellish it with some gold detail: we added the year (2015) and the Chinese symbol for that year’s animal (sheep).

If you’re on a roll with the gold paint, add some more gold embellishments to the “firecrackers.”  We added the symbol for a sheep (or our best effort at Chinese calligraphy) to each firecracker.

Now tie the red ribbon to the head plate, it should hang vertically.

Attach the firecrackers, you can staple them or tie them on, all the way down the length of the red ribbon.  (See video.)

Add some more pieces of ribbon at the bottom of the garland.

Your garland is ready to hang.

• Thanks to our sister company Kidspot Australia for creating the instructional video.