Categories: Parenting

Easy Animal Crafts: Turn Snake Skin and Feathers Into Fun Wall Art

If there are two things most kids love, it’s crafts and animals. These fun projects combine both to create fun, unique pieces of art that cost very little but will give your child loads of enjoyment.

For this craft, I used snake skin and feathers. My husband found the snake skin, my son collected the feathers on his summer vacation, and I turned them into these fun animal crafts, so this was truly a family effort. We are all very pleased with the result, and we hope you will be, too!

I will list the items you need, and then explain the steps to turn what many would consider natural debris into trendy wall art teeming with science and style. Enjoy!

Fun Animal Crafts: Slither-and-Soar Wall Art

For this project, I used naturally-shed snake skin and naturally-dropped turkey feathers. Please never harm or harass an animal for artifacts. Use what is available and get creative!

Snake Skin
Feathers
Multi-media crafting glue or pink gel glue (can be found in a fake nails kit)
1 Elmer’s Dri-Clear School glue stick
2 sheets of white paper
Scissors
1 inexpensive black picture frames
1 book
Brown paper bags (for table protection)
2 picture-hanging nails
1 hammer

First, get out a brown paper bag. You will be working with glue, so this will help protect your table or other work-surface as you do this and other fun animal crafts. Next, lay out your supplies to ensure you have everything you need to begin working.

Before you glue anything down, it is always a good idea to lay out how your craft should look as a finished product to test different positions until you get a layout you like. Open you frame and discard the sample picture and any packaging. (Bonus Tip: I found my picture frames for $1 each at the local 99-cent store.) Determine if you need to cut your paper to fit your frame, and do so if needed. Then, test your snake skin.

Will you cut the most perfect sections and use those to create an interesting pattern? Do you have the entire snake skin? If so, you can coil it similarly to what I did for my “slither” frame. I folded the skin over so the finished product would display both the top and underside of the skin, showing off the interesting patterns on each side.

After you find the right position, leave the snake skin in place. Begin lifting sections and applying crafting glue or pink gel nail glue to the paper (and the snake skin, if necessary) and pressing the skin back in place. Work slowly, and place a book or another object (even the glue stick for small sections) on top of this section for a few minutes to help weight it down and encourage the skin to adhere to the paper as you go. Do not tug or pull on the skin too much as you work.

Continue this process until the entire skin is glued down and has been pressed gently with the book. Next, position your snake-skin paper into the frame and put the back of the frame in place. Now, stand back, admire your work, and get ready to move on to the “soar” frame!

These animal crafts are constructed in nearly identical fashion with one exception. When I attempted to use the gel nail glue with the feathers, I soon realized it wasn’t working very well. I switched to the Elmer’s School glue stick and saw much better results. Simply follow all the above steps to create the frame with the feathers. Arrange your feathers in various ways before gluing to find the sweet spot for each one. Then, remove it and apply the glue stick to the general area you want to place the feather. Repeat with all feathers.