Flag Art

by Holly

I love the 4th of July!  Usually we are at my parents house celebrating with fireworks in the backyard (you can still do that where they live).  But, this year with gas prices so high, we decided to stay home.  Bummer!
However, there are still lots of fun things to do around here.  We are looking forward to our communities bike decorating contest, parade, and picnic which we have never been here to participate in.
I thought that today I would do a patriotic craft with the kids.  Get them talking about the 4th of July and what it means that we celebrate it.  So we ended up doing a paper project (easy for my 3 year old) that had to do with our nation's flag and involved a lot of paper tearing and glue sticks (all his favorites).
The end result is a decoupage looking flag.  Ours actually ended up looking more camouflage than decoupage.  But, hey, I've got three boys.  Whatta ya expect?

Now you can do this as small and easy, using just an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper.  We made ours bigger and then mounted it to a canvas that would hang on our wall (about 30" by 24").

For this project you need:

whatever size paper you want your finished flag to be
lots of red, white, and blue scrap paper for tearing
scissors
ruler
pencil
glue sticks

Using a ruler and pencil, draw out the stripes on your paper (7 red, 6 white) and blue corner square.

Kind of hard to see here, but pretty self explanatory.  Then cut out each stripe and the corner blue square.  I labeled each one on the back so it would be easy when they needed to be put back together (1R, 1W, 2R, 2W, 3R, 3W, and so on).

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Then, let the kids go at it.  I gave each of my kids a color and they tore up the scrap paper and starting gluing.  This is great for them because it doesn't have to be perfect.  You are going to trim it all down later, so let them be creative.

I think little man was just so excited that I actually let him have a glue stick.
This part may take a while, depending on the size of your flag, so patience is key here.  Trust me!  I think my kids pooped out at about 3 stripes each, and then it became more of Momma's project.  But they got the idea, right?
Once a stripe is done, turn it over and use your scissors to trim the excess scrap paper that is hanging over the sides.

Nice and neat, and ready to be put back together again.  Turning the flag over to the back side, you can just tape the stripes back together as you go...

Like I said before, we mounted ours on an old canvas that I fully intend to use someday.  But for now...

My boys are proudly displaying their stars and stripes!  (Notice we added some simple white stars, one for each member of our family.  We did discuss that there are really 50 stars on the real flag and what they stand for, so no worries all you history teachers out there.)
Hope you all have a fabulous holiday celebrating our country!  Happy Friday!