Paper Flag Craft

The other day, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Dawson sat on the couch watching TV. Still in his pajamas, because that's how we roll in this house. You could tell his attention span was slowly disappearing by the fact that every part of his body was moving. Feet shaking, fingers tapping, funny faces being made. I knew the words were coming, the words every parent hates to hear. "Mom! I'm boooored!" 

I decided to be proactive and come up with something before that moment hit. I stood in the craft room, looked around and decided a paper craft was perfect. An American Flag paper craft. He loves American flags and using my paper cutter is the equivalent of giving him a giant bag of candy without an eating limit.

First we measured the picture frame to see how big we needed to make the background paper.

We got all of our colors together and cut them down to the shape/size we needed.

Here is where I'm going to throw a bunch of numbers at you and hope you don't get confused. 

The frame is 8 by 10.

The flag is 7 by 6 inch.

The blue part of the flag is 4 by 3 inch.

The stars and stripes are each half an inch.

Got it? Good!

Dawson glued the stripes on, every half inch. Our flag isn't exactly a perfect replica, but you get the idea.

We trimmed off the extra red, attached the blue square and I started the super fun job of punching stars out with our OLD and stiff paper punch. Dawson tried, but failed. Seriously, I'm 96% sure I got the paper punch in high school, early years high school.  I'm surprised it still works. I'm even more surprised I haven't lost it yet.

Dawson glued the stars on.

We glued the finished flag to the background, stuck it in the frame and we were done!

I think total this project took us about 30 minutes, start to finish. If you have antsy kids, cut all the paper out before you start and it would take even less time. 

Perfect for a quick 4th of July craft!