Easter Craft for Kids: Faux Stain Glass Cross

You're sitting in church when your children's pastor approaches you about doing a craft with the kids for Easter Sunday. Now, you are not an incredibly crafty person, but you agree. So what kind of Easter craft can you do?

A quick perusing of the internet and you have an idea. The children can make a faux stain glassed cross. A great craft indeed, but which way is the best way to do this craft? It all depends on the age of the children you will be working with and the time you want to put into it.

If you just want a ready made kit that the children can put together, Amazon.com may be the place to look. For less than twenty dollars you can have enough materials to make fifty stain glass crosses. The kits include paper, glue, and instructions. This is definitely the easiest way to make a stain glass craft.

Maybe you don't want to put out money on making a stain glass cross. You have supplies on hand and want to utilize those supplies.

If the children you will be working with are young, you can make a stain glass cross with contact paper, tissue paper, construction paper, glue stick, and scissors. This way of making this craft is reminiscent of my grade school art classes and pretty easy to do. You just put down the contact paper with the sticky side up. Then have the children stick pieces of tissue paper onto the contact paper. After all of the tissue paper has been put down, cover it with another sheet of contact paper. Now the stained glass portion of the project is complete.

Now, all you need to do is make the cross portion. For this, you will need two pieces of construction paper. Simply fold the pieces of paper in half. Cut out half of a cross shape. Open the paper back up and you have a cross. I recommend doing both pieces of construction paper at the same time to insure that your crosses are the same size. With small children, you may want to cut out the crosses ahead of time. Now all that is left to do is to glue the stain glass portion (that you made with the contact paper and tissue paper) to one piece of construction paper. Then, glue the other piece of construction paper to the other side, making sure the crosses are lined up. Your stain glass cross is complete!

When working with older children, you may want to expand this craft even more. It will take a lot more time and effort, but the kids are sure to love it. To expand the craft you will need more supplies and some of the supplies may be cumbersome to haul to another location.

One of the things you will need is an iron and ironing board. A traveling ironing board would be perfect for this, but a full size ironing board will work too. Other supplies needed are wax paper, wax crayons, manual pencil sharpener with a large hole, scrap paper, construction paper, glue stick, and scissors.

The first thing that you need is to fold a piece of wax paper in half, then open the paper back up. Then, using your pencil sharpener, shave the crayons over one half of the wax paper. Cheap crayons tend to work better with this craft than Crayola crayons. The cheap crayons will melt faster. Don't be afraid to use lots of colors when making your stain glass cross. The more colors, the more vibrant your creation will be.

After you have shaved your crayons, you will need to fold the wax paper back over and fold down the edges so that no wax leaks out. You will need to lay you're a piece of scrap paper on your ironing board to protect it. The scrap paper can be a paper bag or white computer paper. Lay the wax paper filled with shavings on top of the scrap paper and cover with another piece of the scrap paper.

Make sure that your iron is set on medium heat and that there is no steam. Iron your wax paper (making sure it is between the two sheets of scrap paper) until the crayons are melted. This should take about ten seconds. The longer you iron it, the more the colors will mix together. After this is done, it will take the crayons about thirty seconds to cool down.

As with the craft for younger children, you will need two sheets of construction paper. You will fold them in half and cut out a half cross shape, then open the papers back up. Again, this can be done ahead of time to cut down on time. Glue your wax paper between the pieces of construction paper and you have your stained glass cross.

With both the tissue paper/contact paper version and the wax paper versions of this craft, you may have to cut down the paper before sandwiching it between the construction paper.

Hopefully, this will be a wonderful craft that both children and their parents will love.