Make Magnets from Any Paper: My Three Favorite Methods

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Magnets are a fun and easy way to show off your tiniest art, upcycle your favorite photographs, or display comic book panels, sweet love notes, or pretty papers of all kinds.

I am sooo glad that “cluttercore” is now a thing, because just between us, it’s always been *my* thing. A bare wall or surface is nothing but a spot that I haven’t put something cute yet!

To my endless irritation, my refrigerator isn’t magnetic, but I’ve made up for it by DIYing a giant magnetic wall in the kitchen, and a smaller one in the family room. I love displaying all the greeting cards, A+ schoolwork, concert tickets, and assorted other tchotchkes that one generally puts on a magnet board, but to be honest, my favorite things to display are the magnets, themselves!

Magnets are a great way to upcycle all kinds of cute little things that you’d love to have on display but that are too wee for mounting and framing. I love making all my special little mementos, from postcards to greeting card sentiments to Instamax photos to fortune cookie fortunes into magnets, so I can enjoy looking at them while they hold up other stuff I enjoy looking at–it’s cluttercore at its most decadent, lol!

Here are my favorite ways to DIY magnets from any paper!

Method #1: Mat Board and a Button Magnet

For this method, you will need:

• paper to display
• adhesive (archival glue or double-sided tape, AND E6000 or similar epoxy glue)
• mat board or book board
• button magnet
• ruler, craft knife, scissors

Cut roughly around your image, leaving a border that you can trim to size later. Then, use archival-quality glue or double-sided tape to adhere your image to the back side (not the pretty colored side, unless you want to chance the color being visible through the front of your art!) of mat board.

Use a ruler (a metal one is better than the beat-up plastic one I’m using in the photo below) and craft knife to trim the image and its mat board backing to size:

To seal the front of the image, I like to either laminate it in packing tape or cover it in Diamond Glaze or several coats of Mod Podge. Here, I used packing tape:

Any other fans of My Life as a Background Slytherin out there?

Use E6000 or a similar epoxy glue to adhere a button magnet to the back of the mat board. You can also add additional embellishments like gems and stickers to the front, Sharpie the edges, poke holes at the bottom and add tassels, and do whatever else you can think of to pretty up your magnet further!

Method #2: Sticker/Magnet Maker

For this method you will need:

• paper to display
• Xyron Creative Station Lite or similar machine, with a magnet+laminate cartridge installed
• scissors

If you’ve got (or can borrow!) a store-bought sticker/magnet maker, it makes creating magnets from your own papers SUPER easy.

I own this specific Xyron sticker/magnet maker, but I’ve also got teenagers and their friends who all use the snot out of it, so it gets a lot of use. If you don’t want to buy a whole entire one all for yourself, it’s worth checking out your public library’s DIY or teen space or asking your local Buy Nothing group for one to borrow.

To use a machine like this, you feed your paper into it and let it add adhesive magnet sheeting to the back and laminate the front:

The laminating is especially nice for papers that are glossy or ink that’s water-soluble. Kid art made with washable markers can be so delicate! It’s also an easy way to make a magnet out of an entire photo for display on my gigantic magnet boards.

Method #3: Adhesive Magnet Sheets

For this method, you will need:

• paper to display
• adhesive magnet sheets
• scissors

This method is best for papers that don’t need lamination, Diamond Glaze, or Mod Podge. I like it for my comic panels and my collection of vintage space-themed stamps, but basically anything commercially printed or printed on a laser printer could get away without lamination.

To make these magnets, roughly cut around your image, stick it to the adhesive side of an adhesive magnet sheet, then trim it to size.

Crafting this magnets is a fun kid project, especially for tweens and teens. Give them lots of magazines to cut from, plenty of adhesive magnet sheets, and let them have at it! The finished magnets make sweet handmade gifts for friends and family.

Pro tip: these easy magnets are awesome for the front of a college student’s mini fridge!

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The Poured Rice Fantasy Map Project

I've seen the poured rice fantasy maps being made on Tiktok and YouTube, but my actual inspiration for this project was subbing in an art class in which the kids were hard at work on their own fantasy maps. They'd already done the poured rice step and were deep into embellishing their maps with fantasy and cartography elements. Their teacher had a long list of categories and a Google Slide Deck of reference images for them to use, and I spent two days in that class walking around and cooing over everyone's maps, encouraging them to add elements from a new category, debating river placement and what kinds of sea monsters are the scariest and how many volcanoes one island can reasonably contain.

You know who else is currently writing a fantasy novel AND loves art? My very own homeschooler!

For a Creative Writing/Studio Art enrichment lesson one day, she and I sat down with some large-format drawing paper, our eight-year-old kilogram of rice, and my favorite drawing pens (these are the teenager's favorite drawing pens). 

To make the map, you simply pour out your rice (I've seen some people use lentils, but I loved all the fjordy bits that the rice made)--

--then trace around it!

You can, of course, artificially manipulate the rice to spread it however you want, but the idea is that by letting it do its thing you make a map that looks organic and random and has a particularly detailed coastline.

After that, you listen to music, and you draw!

The teenager was quite happy with creating from her own brain, but I preferred to use reference images. Here's the teenager trying to show me how to draw cliffs like Dover:

I kind of got the idea, but I couldn't make it look good on the map. Oh, well--at least my barrows look awesome!

It's impossible to do any work whatsoever without Mr. Jones being actively weird in your face:

The art class kids who were spending several days on this project had to add a billion details, a compass rose, and a banner title, but the teenager and I were satisfied with our maps after just a couple of hours hanging out together, drawing and listening to music. Here's my fantastic fantasy map:

A henge is OBVIOUSLY at the center of my island, with various barrows around the outskirts. My snowcapped mountains are an embarrassment, but I'm quite proud of my road and my swampland. 

And here is the teenager's. She packed a LOT of detail into just a couple of hours!

I LOVE that her map also has a henge! All the Giant Rocks Day is such a good memory!

I'd suggested that the teenager might want to use her fantasy map as THE map for her fantasy novel, but she preferred to make it just a fantastical fantasy of a map, no lore included. But it did get her thinking about geography and place in her story, so I'm keeping this project as a cross-curricular Creative Writing/Studio Art effort.

If a kid is up for an entire world-building experience, I do think it would be cool to actually make this map in coordination with creative writing, perhaps adding new features to the map as you think of them for a story, and vice versa. Otherwise, this project lends itself to all kinds of geography extensions, from basic map-reading to AP Human Geography. Or make up your own coordinate system and then locate places on the map using it! Model the terrain in salt dough! Photocopy the outline and create a political map showing population and government! Invent a flag, then sew it! Find a partner who also created a map, pretend their island is in the same world, and form a political alliance... or declare war! 

This was our eight-year-old kilogram of rice's final act of service. It began its time as a sensory material, lived most of its life as a kid-measured exact kilogram for admiration and reference, and after this, its last hurrah as an implement of cartographic creation, it was ceremoniously retired around the backyard, where it can end its days by offering sustenance and enrichment to our flock of half-wild chickens.

It's only now occurring to me to wonder if whatever I used to dye that rice eight years ago is okay for chickens to eat now. OMG ISN'T A THING THAT BIRDS AREN'T ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO EAT DRY RICE?

You know what? Whatever, I'm sure it's fine. If you come back to my blog and find this post deleted, though, it's because I accidentally killed our flock of chickens and I need to cover my tracks.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How-to: Kid-Decorated Bean Bags from Stash Fabric

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World way back in 2013!

Got some stash light-colored fabric? 

 Got a bored kid? 

 These bean bags don't take much material, so any light-colored fabric from your scrap bin is great for this project. Your kiddos will have a fabulous time decorating them with fabric pens or fabric paints, and when they're done, just a few straight seams and a handful of beans turns them into a super-fun soft toy. 

 Kid-decorated bean bags make great gifts for children to help make for other children--perfect for all those summer birthday parties that you're constantly shuttling them off to. They'll keep them busy creating on a rainy day, and the finished bean bags are soft enough that a hurled one has a good chance of not knocking over something delicate and expensive in your living room. 

 Here's how to make your own: 

  1. Cut scrap fabric to size. We'll be following along with my original stenciled bean bags tutorial to make these kid-decorated ones, so I'm using my standard 4.5" square template. You can go larger, though, if you've got some larger scraps and you don't want to create waste by trimming them. Just stick to a square shape, and feel free to experiment! 

  2. Back with freezer paper, or starch the heck out of it! Stiffening the fabric is really essential to making this a kid-friendly project--kids don't like shifty, squiggly surfaces, and trying to use fabric markers to draw a detailed portrait of the cat on an un-stiffened piece of cotton is just a recipe for a tantrum. And don't you have enough of those already? 

 You can saturate the fabric with spray starch (have you tried homemade spray starch?), but my quicker, simpler solution is to iron freezer paper to the back of my fabric. It gives each square the sturdiness of paper, and my kids have no problems working on that surface. 

 3. Let the kids loose! I have a large selection of Jacquard fabric paint, Tee Juice markers, and Crayola fabric crayons, and I set my kids free with all of them. My kiddos LOVE to use the fabric paints and fabric markers, but I can't ever get them to try out the fabric crayons (too fussy!). 

 Whichever medium you use, let it dry and cure for at least 24 hours before the next step. 

  4. Sew the bean bags. Follow my stenciled bean bags tutorial, or just wing it--it's not rocket surgery. You could use your own dried beans, but if you're going to purchase dried beans for these bean bags, though, go ahead and purchase white beans. It doesn't make a ton of difference, but especially if you're using thinner fabric and haven't covered the surface completely in paint, the white beans look a little nicer inside the bean bags than pinto beans do. 

 Your kiddos can start playing with their bean bags as soon as you've finished sewing them. If you'd like to give them as a gift, it just takes another ten or so minutes to also sew up a nice drawstring bag to package them.

How to Earn the Girl Scout CSA Outdoor Art Badge (Without Doing Any of the Suggested Activities, Ahem)

Whenever I teach multi-level Girl Scout leaders and we get to talking about badges, I always tell them that a great way for multiple levels of Girl Scouts to simultaneously earn a certain badge is to do none of the suggested activities. 

Your troop of Cadettes, Seniors, and Ambassadors want to earn the Space Science badge at each of their levels? Don't do any of the activities suggested for any of those levels. Instead, make up your own activities! 

So when six of my CSA Girl Scouts wanted to come together to earn the Outdoor Art badge last month, we threw out the badge books and instead used a Shared Google Doc to figure out what we actually wanted to do.

After seeing that the kids were mostly interested in various carving skills, I steered the meeting towards one that would involve exploring our local area's limestone industry, then engaging in hands-on experimentation with limestone art, and expanding into other ways to carve and embellish sculptural art.

We met on the campus of Indiana University-Bloomington, and while standing under the Sample Gates we talked about how and where limestone was formed. Our area is unique because the band of Salem Limestone underneath it is quite narrow and only spans the length of two counties. That's why we see so many old quarries around here--they had to be put close together, because that's where the limestone is! 

Salem Limestone has good consistency and small grains because of the way that the waves constantly agitated the shallow sea that once existed above it. It's strong, easily carved, and holds detail well. And yet, until the rail industry was extensive enough to provide transportation, Salem Limestone was only a local industry. That's why we see so many old residential houses with limestone facades--there was loads of limestone to be had locally, and no outside markets to buy it up!

When railroads came to the area, however, Salem Limestone became a national industry. That's why there are so many train tracks and rail trails in our area--there used to be railroads everywhere to transport that limestone!

Labor reforms were eventually necessary to the industry. Limestone carving was difficult, manual labor, and before reforms, workers would tell stories of how unemployed people would just stand next to the quarries all day. If a manager saw that a worker wasn't working as hard as they thought he should, the manager would fire that worker on the spot and call a bystander in to take his place. Even after reforms, limestone carving remained difficult, manual labor, but it paid a living wage and was the expected career of several generations of families. 

The evolution of architecture styles and building materials eventually tanked the Salem Limestone industry, and now it's mostly used for niche, high-end architecture and university campuses that utilize the "collegiate gothic" style. When the industry tanked, people who'd worked in quarries for their entire careers, after their parents and grandparents had worked in the same quarries for their entire careers, and who expected their children to also work in the same quarries, were let go. They had no other readily marketable skills, no disposable income used to further their education, and there was no other nearby industry that they could easily transition to. Their children were also stuck without access to the careers they'd planned, and even with a university right in town, one whose buildings were built from their parents' and grandparents' labor, they didn't have the income or necessarily the academic preparation for higher education. That's partially why our area has such a weird income/education/culture divide--it economically hobbled whole swaths of long-term residents who now fight for employment and housing and cultural ideals against the hyper-educated residents who are here because of the university.

Never let it be said that I led a single Girl Scout meeting without bringing up politics and social justice and the price of long-term rentals in town!

So after we were all inspired to seize the means of production and legislate universal pre-K and build low-barrier shelters for the unhoused, we went on a walking tour of the IU campus to see some examples of limestone architecture. The kids were asked to bring binoculars--

They did look at interesting architecture with their binoculars, but spent a rather shocking amount of time also looking at innocent passersby...

--and cameras, and were instructed to take photos of interesting architecture as part of their badge activities. 

Here's Franklin Hall, which began as the university's library:

It's been extensively renovated and turned into the home of the university's Media School--

--but the John Milton quote remains relevant:

This is the Student Building:

The clock tower has 14 bells that chime every 15 minutes, and can also be played live. In 1990 that whole tower burned down and had to rebuilt using the original 1905 plans.

We walked around and photographed a few more buildings and the campus cemetery, although the kids were definitely more excited about the non-architectural things that we also saw, like squirrels, a wedding party trying to take photos in the rain, a random couple of students breaking geodes on the street, etc.

After we had seen all the awesome limestone things, we settled down to make our own awesome things! With such a diverse cast of characters, I'm never entirely sure who knows what, so I started with a basic lesson for everyone on pocket knife safety, how to hold a knife while whittling and carving, and how to sharpen a knife. Then Matt and my co-leader and I set up stations so the kids could explore various carving and embellishing skills.

Here's Will at the limestone engraving station:

Hoadley Quarry gave Matt several pieces of limestone for hand carving and engraving. I brought my workhorse Dremel and a set of engraving bits, and only lost one to an over-zealous Girl Scout!

We set up a separate station for limestone hand carving, with the larger pieces of limestone, a sandbag and old towel to brace the limestone, and my set of stone carving tools that's similar to this one. 

These two stations also had safety glasses, because nobody likes a corneal abrasion!

The kids could use their own pocket knives or my set of wood carving tools to carve soap or twigs:

I showed the kids these super cute twig gnomes, and some of them tried it out, while others did their own thing.

We had a couple of stations set up with wood burners. The kids could burn details into their wood carvings, or wood burn a wooden spoon. It was a little early for holiday gift-making when we met, but a wood burned spoon would make an awesome gift!

I also brought my acrylics, brushes, and water cups and set up a station in case a kid felt more like surface decoration than carving, and a couple of kids used this space to paint their twig gnomes or experiment with adding detail to their limestone engraving.

Overall, this was a super successful Girl Scout meeting! The kids all tried new things, all found something they liked doing, all learned some useful things and still had time to chat and mess around. I feel like the relevance of studying a local industry that's so visually apparent in their daily lives added meaning to the badge work, and hopefully helped them contextualize some local issues.

And if nobody's parent gets a wood burned spoon for Christmas, it's not my fault!

I Bought My Kid a Sticker Maker

 

I wasn't sure that this sticker maker was actually going to be a hit. Syd didn't touch it for the entire summer after I bought it for her birthday, and I'm the one who actually ended up getting it out early this autumn and messing around with it trying to figure it out.

But if there is one gold standard about parenting, it is this: if you want your kids to get interested in something, ignore them and get yourself interested in that thing. Whether it's dried apricots, The Lord of the Rings, or your latest awesome art supply, if you're into something and act like you don't know they're around, kids show up and try stuff out just to get into your business. 

On an unrelated note, ahem, I have also been woken up by the children from every single nap I have ever tried to take since they've been born. I swear that a kid can need nothing from me, can flat-out reject my company, and as soon as I close my bedroom door, lie down, get comfy, and doze off, I hear, "Mom?" And it's always something stupid, like where are the scissors or are we supposed to be saving the French bread for dinner or can we go to the bookstore this weekend.

Literally TODAY I lay down on my bed for like five minutes to TikTok as my reward for mostly-ish picking up the house, fell asleep, and fourteen seconds later Syd was all, "Mom?"

To be fair, she was calling for me to see if I was ready to drive her to ballet, but still! 

So when I got out the sticker maker stuff for the first time one day, set it all up at the kitchen table, figured out how to load and use the cartridges, and started cutting out some comic book pages that I thought might make excellent stickers--

--Syd found me and immediately figured out all the sticker stuff and off she went, making her own art into stickers:

Because you can't arrive at a dog's birthday party empty-handed!

Here are the sticker maker supplies that Syd now uses every week:

• Xyron Creative Station Lite
• Xyron Magnet/Laminate Roll
• Xyron Laminate/Adhesive Roll

She uses the supplies entirely to make stickers from her own art, and she prefers the simple adhesive roll, rather than the roll that both adds adhesive to the back AND laminates the front, because she likes to continue to add to and embellish her art even after it's made into stickers.

I don't make art, and so I've made stickers from comics, vintage books, and clip art, digital images, and the kids' scanned artwork all printed on plain copy paper. I also prefer the look of the unlaminated stickers, although I suspect that my comic stickers aren't particularly archivally sound.

Syd was mildly horrified to see that I'd essentially made fanart of another one of her projects.

I'd be curious to price out about how much each square inch of sticker costs, but I'm too lazy to do that right now. It feels cheap enough, though, that I wouldn't be sad letting the kids make stickers when their friends come over or bringing it out at a Girl Scout meeting. 

I'm also very eager to try scanning, printing, and then making into stickers the fussy cut graphics that I like to decoupage onto wood blocks. I'd lose some eco-friendliness and the coolness of using the actual comic, but I could use graphics from comics that I'm not willing to cut up and a sticker might be more reliable and less messy than a piece of vintage low-grade paper and glue.

Christmas cardmaking will be VERY fun, too.

And I can't wait to see what Syd makes next, too!

P.S. I can't let you go without mentioning that I'm also super into DIY stickers that I make using repositionable glue. These were awesome especially when the kids were little and sticking stickers everywhere, because they peel right off any surface--and stick right down again somewhere else!

How to Make Mason Jar Lid Ring Christmas Ornaments

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

If you enjoy canning, don't you have SOOOOO many Mason jar lid rings?

Those Mason jar lid rings, also called screw bands, can be re-used (unlike the lid tops, which you aren't supposed to re-use at all), but only until they start to rust or get bent or dinged, something that seems to happen with my rings, at least, after very few uses.

Sigh.

Fortunately, there are loads of ways to repurpose these rings so that you're not just adding them to the waste stream. And since it's December, my favorite way to repurpose ANYTHING this month has to be Christmas ornaments!

These Mason jar lid ring Christmas ornaments look a lot harder to make than they are. If you're artistic, you'll love using these to show off your skills, but even if you're not--hey, that's why clip art, stickers, and patterned paper were invented!

Supplies

To make these ornaments, you will need:

• Mason jar lid rings. Repurpose ones that are no longer suitable for canning. Don't can? You know someone who does, or check on Freecycle or Craigslist--there is someone out there who would LOVE to give you their dinged-up canning supplies.
• Ribbon. Stash ribbon is fine, but twine, hemp cord, or even thin chain would work.
• Mat board or thick cardboard. For these particular ornaments, I used mat board scraps (does it still count as hoarding if you really do use the stuff someday?), but thick cardboard--something thicker than card stock or food packaging--would also be fine.
• Decorative paper. Use scrapbook paper, old book pages or sheet music, or even wrapping paper.
• Image for the ornament's front. My daughter traced the inside edge of a Mason jar lid ring, then created several pieces of original artwork for our ornament fronts, all of which I photocopied onto card stock so that we could make multiples. Anything fun and creative would make a beautiful ornament, however. If you've got scrapbook supplies, dig them out!
• Spray paint (optional). It's not eco-friendly, but if you want to change the color of your Mason jar lid ring from rusted metal, this is your best option. I've made these ornaments both ways, and while I do like the painted ornaments better, it's not necessarily worth the time that it takes to paint them.
• Glue. You need an archival glue suitable for paper and a separate, sturdier glue for the rings. I used spray mount for the former and hot glue for the latter.

Directions

1. Trace the inside edge of a Mason jar lid ring. This will be your template for cutting the decorative paper back, the mat board middle, and the featured image on the front.

2. Make a beautiful ornament front. The Mason jar lid ring makes the perfect frame for your original art. Whatever medium you prefer, whether it's watercolors, acrylics, markers, or charcoal, it will look adorable in this simple round frame. But don't forget that you can also use stickers, cut-outs, clip art, or anything else you'd like in order to embellish these ornament fronts.

3. Cut all pieces to size. The ornament front, mat board or card stock, and ornament backing paper should all be cut to your template. You can pop them into the Mason jar lid ring to check the fit--sometimes I've found that I haven't cut a piece carefully and have to trim it a bit. Better to do that now than when you're racing the hot glue gun!

4. Glue the ornament front, middle, and back together. Spray mount gives the most archival result, but an ordinary glue stick is also perfectly serviceable.

5. Do you want to paint the Mason jar lid ring? If so, do it now! Spray clear sealant, with or without painting the rings, is another option.

6. Tie ribbon onto the Mason jar lid ring. A lark's head knot is just about the easiest and most attractive of knots, and that's what you're going to do here. Tie the ends of the ribbon into a bow, and there you have your ornament hanger!

7. Glue the ornament piece to the Mason jar lid ring. I've tried several types of glue with this ornament, and none are really ideal. The most full-proof glue is hot glue, but you'll have to work quickly. Lay out the ornament, face-down, and the Mason jar lid ring, flat side down and with the ribbon at the top, and then quickly dispense hot glue around the inside edge of the lid ring. Immediately set the ornament into the lid ring and press it down so that it's flush against the flat side of the lid ring.

These ornaments are a great way to show off a kid's artwork--or your own! A matching set of complementary ornaments also makes a nice handmade gift.

But of course, I like them best on my own tree, displaying all of our homemade love for the season.

Homeschool High School Art Class: How to Earn the Girl Scout Senior Collage Artist Badge

 

My obsession with using Girl Scout badges as homeschool units of study continues, as Will and I turned earning the Girl Scout Senior Collage Artist badge into an excellent and super fun study that I'll incorporate into part of a high school fine arts credit for her. 

Step 1: Explore collage. Normally, I wouldn't have thought twice about taking a field trip to an art museum to look at collages, but... you know, there's a pandemic going on. Now that our local university's art museum has re-opened, I do think we'll chance a visit, but until then, I satisfied this step by requesting a ton of collage books from our public library and employing contact-free pick-up. 

I actually ended up really liking what these books brought to our study, as we were able to look through not just fine art collage books but also casual how-to and craft books, which I think gave us more ideas about what we, ourselves, could do with collage. 

Here are some of the collage books that we explored:

Our public library has a stellar collection of zines, so if we'd had more access to the library, or if I'd also been leading Syd through this badge, I was toying with the idea of centering all the activities on zine creation.

Next time!

Step 2: Focus on composition. For this step, Will did do one of the suggested activities, just because it looked like fun!

Since this was a for-fun activity, not really one that I had planned as part of her fine arts unit, I didn't make any criteria for neatness, precision, or craftsmanship. If I had, I might have showed Will how to use our paper cutter to make precise squares, or how to grid the paper lightly to ensure accurate placement, etc. But since this was our very first actual collage activity, and since Will isn't the most confident artist on the planet, "cubomania" turned out to be the perfect low-impact, high-interest collage to get her interested in digging deeper.

3. Create with color. Here's another suggested activity that worked perfectly as written and was also very fun! It tied well into a review of the color wheel, although, as you can see, Will chose to work entirely in greyscale:

Here are some of our color wheel resources:

• 3D color wheels. My Scouts have a varying level of patience with step-by-step directed activities such as this one, but this DOES make a beautiful hanging piece!
• color wheels composed with strange paintbrushes. Sometimes it's not what you make, but how you make it that's the point of the activity. This project ties into the Outdoor Art badges by challenging kids to make the standard color wheel, but to paint it with something unusual. In this particular activity, I had my kids use tree branches, but it would be fun to have kids first collect a variety of nature finds to use--perhaps even without telling them what they'll have to use them for! I think older kids especially enjoy these kinds of physical challenges that are both unusual and maybe just a tad bit babyish. Who wouldn't want to play a little bit longer?
• giant collaborative color wheel. Yes, this is written as a preschool art activity, but not all process-oriented art is solely for preschoolers! This would be a fun group activity to begin a color study, especially if you encourage kids to collect ephemera between meetings. 
• interactive color wheel. This is such a good idea! Instead of using a pre-printed template, though, I think it would be fun to have kids make their own card stock template, and then let them choose their own colors and color wheel combination. Think how much fun they'd have playing with their favorite colors in this wheel, instead of the standard assortment.
• mandala color wheel. Here's a much more sophisticated color wheel that will make an appropriate challenge for an older kid.
• spinning color wheel. This is a quick and easy activity that gets kids up and moving a bit.

Step 4: Use found objects. Will and I went off the rails for the last two steps of this badge, and so instead of creating a found object collage, for this step we reviewed symmetry and how it effects artistic composition. 

Afterwards, Will created a larger piece that incorporated three different types of symmetry into a single composition. 

Step 5: Share a message. Until this step, each of Will's collages had been completed in a single sitting. Even if it took her a couple of hours and/or several episodes of Welcome to Night Vale, each time, when she got up from the art table, she had a finished product to show.

I wanted Will to have the experience of creating a multi-step, multi-day, more involved project, so instead of any of the "share a message" activities, we created that elaborate piece.

I used this large-format collage animal tutorial, and I LOVED it! The only step that we did not attempt was the free-form, process-oriented art while listening to music, and that's only because I have SO much large-format paper ephemera, some of which includes old kid art. So that's what we tore into strips--

--and used as the base for our collage animals:

Matt made us the tracers, and I was surprised when Will wanted to create not the dog that I'd just assumed she would, but an owl:

Black screenprinting ink worked great as a substitute for india ink, but polyurethane did not work as well as the resin called for in the tutorial would have. Definitely use the resin for realistically shiny eyes!

Imperfectly shiny eyes aside, Will and I are both very pleased with her large-format, multi-step, carefully-crafted owl collage:

It's now mounted high in our family room, so it can watch over our bookshelves and keep our books safe from mice.

Even though Will was my only Girl Scout who earned this badge with me, I think this is a badge that would work particularly well for Girl Scout troop meetings. It's set up so that completing one collage per meeting is very manageable, other than that last collage, but the tutorial for that one is written by an art teacher who lays out how to space it out over a period of days. Add in a socially-distanced field trip to an art museum, followed by a picnic and some free time outdoors, and you have a picture-perfect Girl Scout badge!

Want to do more with collage? Here are some of my favorite collage resources and projects, and even more collage projects and resources that are on my to-do list:

• Jack-o-lantern. This is a little cheezy, yes, but so fun and festive to do on a holiday week!
• reflection board. I think this would be such a cool starting activity for every Girl Scout meeting while you're working through the Collage Artist badge, or for the beginning of every school day if you're incorporating it into your homeschool. There's a lot to be said about the experience of getting into the practice of something, even if only temporarily, and I love this as an extension or alternative to journaling. 
• window cards. Here's a way to multi-task collage activities with a service project! You could use this activity to make Christmas or Valentine cards, in particular, because they both have iconographic silhouettes that come to mind. Kids could make them for their families or for nursing home residents. 
• tags and bookmarks. This could be another good pre-holiday activity, or you could forget the gift tags and just focus on bookmarks. The extra artistry and detailing that's called for with these types of projects can be extra-appealing to older kids, I've found, and sourcing materials should be easy, because you can simply ask kids to bring in some of their recycling!
• magnets. These are similar to the tags and bookmarks, above. This project would work well with the Senior Room Makeover badge, since kids could also make an upcycled magnet board to go with it (pro tip: thrift old cookie sheets!).
• postcards. You have to be a little more careful with postcards, but it's fun to see how things end up when they go through the mail! I recently did a similar project with my Girl Scout troop as an at-home activity, and the kids are all waiting with bated breath to receive them as I type this!