friday craft day : kleenex box cars

Hello Simple As That readers! I’m honored to be able to share one of our favorite crafts with you today. My name is Brooke Leigh – I’m the mother of a spastic two year old boy & a sassy two month old baby girl. You can find me (and my crazy, loving family of course!) over at First Avenue.

During this time of year everyone seems to go through a lot of these! I’m a firm believer in trying to reuse as many things as we possibly can, so why throw those old Kleenex boxes away when you can recycle them?

My son is HUGE into cars right now (seriously, we have an overwhelming amount here, I step on them constantly.) So, we turn these old Kleenex boxes into cars. You heard me right, cars! He’ll push these around on the floor as if they were an actual toy car, & shove his matchbox cars in them. We even gave one away as a present box when we went to his friend’s birthday party, & for a three year old boy – receiving a car shaped gift box filled with small goodies was like me opening a box from Kay Jewelers. Oh goodness, I got away with my rambling – I should get on with the project!

If you have an older kid, you can have them do the “prep” work with you. Since my son is so young, I have everything set and ready to go for him before bringing him over to the table. Each Kleenex box is wrapped in scrapbook paper – you can do a solid color or multi color – whatever your child’s preference is. The wheels are circles cut out of thick foam. (You can purchase this at any craft store for about $1.50 a sheet. We use the bottom of an average size coffee mug to trace our circles – you can get about 16 wheels out of one sheet if you do it this way.) It’s rather hard to cut a perfect circle out of foam, but since we don’t mind imperfection here, it’s okay their rough around the edges!