Make Your Own: Child Friendly Nativity

A few weeks ago Sethboy was begging for a craft time. I had been wanting make something with all the toilet paper tubes that we had been collecting and we had Styrofoam balls left from our Super Simple Snowman we made last year.

We also had lots of felt, some yarn and lots of glue sticks.

This is what we came up with:

Seth picked out the colors for each person and helped with the eyes but not much else. He did like watching me put it together but his favorite part is playing with Mary, Joseph and the shepherd. Cameron has pretty much sheared the poor sheep, but we can always make a new one or glue some new fleece on.

We will not be making wisemen because they didn’t actually visit Jesus at the stable. I will be making a baby Jesus and manger to put in the stable on Christmas morning.

Here is what we used to make our child friendly nativity set:
*felt
*toilet paper tubes
*craft sticks
*hot glue
*small Styrofoam balls
*yarn
*googly eyes

Start with the head:

1. Glue eyes onto Styrofoam ball.
2. Wind yarn around your four fingers until you are happy with the amount.
3. Take a small piece of yarn and tie it around the middle or your wound up yarn.
4. Cut the loops so you have individual strand of hair.
5. Take a small section from each side of the knot and trim it to be bangs.
6. Put a small amount of hot glue on top of the head and place the knot in the hair there, making sure the bangs are over the eyes.

For the body:
1.Cut a piece of felt the width of the body, wrap it around the toilet paper tube and hot glue into place.
2.Add a belt.
3.Cut a 6″x2″ rectangle of felt for the arms. Glue on two small ovals for the hands.
4. Glue the arms to the top of the toilet paper tube.I found it easiest to glue around the top of the tp tube and then place the arms on top.
5. Glue the head on top of the arms.

For the feet:

1. Cut a craft stick slightly wider than the base of your toilet paper tube- you should be able to get both feet from one stick- and draw sandals with a permanent marker.
2. Glue onto the base of the toilet paper tube.

You are done!

To make Mary we left her hair looped and added a head covering. You can see she has no feet in this picture, that’s because she has been played with a lot already and her feet came off and I haven’t taken the time to fix them…eventually she will have feet again. 🙂

For the shepherd I glued a craft stick to him and then glued his arm around that.

There you go. 🙂 You’re welcome. Have fun. 🙂 Hopefully you will be able to figure out now to make a stable the people actually fit in. I ran out of hot glue sticks and craft sticks.