Making a Papier-Mache Starfish

It’s that time of the term- end of school projects- this time the theme is your favourite part of the seaside. I had fantastic ideas of visiting lots of local beaches and creating a layer jar, which is of course why we ended up making a papier-mache starfish.CM decided her favourite part of the beach is starfish. Not that I can actually remember us seeing one, but hey ho. And so as we came up with a few starfish based crafts, we of course ended up echoing previous projects with papier-mache. 

This was a new one on me. I’ve only used papier-mache with balloons before, so I was left scratching my head.

We started by finding a starfish template we liked, fortunately there are a few to choose from at Kidspot. I drew a pentagram on a piece of cardboard, and we created the starfish shape around it. A bit of care with a pair of scissors and we had our base.Next was to figure out how to make it 3D. We made rolls of newspaper and cut strips in various lengths. We made a paste using one part plain flour to two parts water, mixing to ensure there were no lumps.I was really impressed with the finished result, it was as messy as always, but we did end up with a starfish. Once left to dry overnight, we then added honey nut loops with craft glue to create the familiar spiny skin.Once we had the starfish created we moved on to the next part- painting. One of CM’s favourite pastimes, a key consideration was getting the colour just right. With close inspection, we added white and yellow to our orange because we didn’t want the colour to be too bright.But something a little special was a part of the brief, so adding a layer of gold glitter paint was a necessity.And with that CM was pleased with the finished result. Effortlessly integrating on the beach.