Flapping Butterfly Craft (free printable)
This flapping butterfly craft is so much fun for kids to color, cut, and craft! When you’re done, check out this beaded butterfly craft too! This post contains affiliate links.
With Spring officially here, the caterpillars are working hard on becoming butterflies, so it’s time to get some butterfly crafts going!
Today, I’m going to be sharing a fun and simple craft using easy household materials! That is, we’re going to be making a flapping butterfly craft, including a free printable to color and use to make this!
This flapping butterfly craft is constructed using an inner stick and an outer straw that connects to each wing of the butterfly using an additional strap of paper. That way, when you hold it by the straw and pull on the stick, the wings flap!
It’s quite easy to craft and kids will have so much fun playing with it too!
Thanks to the paperlike nature of a butterfly’s wings, paper IS the perfect crafting medium here!
And while you CAN laminate this for durability, you’ll likely lose a lot of that free-flowing flutter that this flapping butterfly craft creates.
In fact, if you do want to protect this, you may be better off using something like packing tape to seal it rather than laminating it for real.
How to make a flapping butterfly craft
What you need
- The template (find it at the end of this post) printed on regular paper
- Markers – this one was crafted using alcohol markers, but kids should use regular water-based washable markers
- Scissors
- Cardstock scrap
- Scotch tape
- A skewer
- Craft knife
- Regular sized plastic or paper straw
Tutorial
1. Choose if you’d like to make a larger or smaller butterfly. Print out your templates and color them in. While we stuck with a traditional Monarch Butterfly color pattern (only using orange and yellow markers), you can color your butterfly in as many colors as you’d like!
You can also add different patterns to the different sections of the wings, or add inspirational words to the blank spaces.
2. Cut the template out.
3. Flip over your butterfly so that the back is visible. Cut a 3×1 inch strip of paper. Fold it down the center. Then fold up the two ends about 1 cm from the end. Hold it so that it forms a T shape.
4. Glue it down so that the two side flaps are on the butterfly, and the center fold sticks up.
5. Split a skewer down the center, about an inch from the top. A craft knife may help you do this neatly.
6. Stick it over the center fold of the strip of paper on your flapping butterfly craft.
7. Tape or glue it in place.
8. Cut about 2 inches slit in two opposite sides down the top of a straw.
9. Slide it over your skewer and over the paper so that it passes the paper and overlaps the butterfly wings themselves.
10. Tape or glue that in place above the strip of paper, on the wing itself.
Your flapping butterfly craft is complete!
To make it fly, hold the straw with one hand and move the skewer up and down with the other. Watch that butterfly go!
Download the free flapping butterfly craft template
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