I went to Ikea last week. I didn’t buy anything very exciting – a chopping board, some bag clips, a couple of rolls of paper, and some straws!
I just couldn’t resist bring home the straws, even though we already had a huge tub of them at home already, but they were such bright, fun colours. When we got home I added them to my growing collection – some we’ve bought and many we’ve washed and recycled.
“What are we going to do with all those straws?” my 10 year old asked me.
“Something cool!” I replied as I started snipping straws into little bits.
And these simple straw mosaic art collages turned out even cooler than I expected!
As I snipped and snipped and little bits of straw dropped into the container (and flew all around the room! Anyone know a way to stop that happening when you cut straws?) my kids remarked on how pleasing the colour co-ordinated straws looked. It’s always a good sign when the art materials look gorgeous before you even start creating!
This is a simple collage activity, with a lot of fine motor work and some interesting twists thrown in for good measure.
Make some straw mosaic art!
You’ll need :
- straws
- scissors
- paper
- glue – PVA or craft glue works best
- container and brush for the glue
- somewhere flat to dry your creations
We used a variety of straws in different sizes. The big, fat, ‘slurpee’ straws are much easier to manipulate, so worth hunting down if you can. You can buy them at various places, including Ikea, or recycle them if you like frozen coke as much as I do!
Using a glue stick will work, but you need to put it on very thickly and we had lots of straws fall off after it was dry. Using PVA (craft glue) with a brush and applying a thick layer a little at a time works best and the straws have stayed stuck. It will take a while to dry though so make sure you have somewhere flat to dry your masterpieces.
Make sure you have some extra straws and scissors on hand for getting creative and experimenting with different sized pieces and cutting them in different ways.
Now all you need to do is start creating!
My 7 year old worked so hard making mosaiced pictures. It really does give your fine motor skills a work out. I love his flower and snail
The bigger kids started out experimenting with colours and patterns. They were disappointed there wasn’t any purple to complete the rainbow.
Then we started getting creative and experimenting with different heights of straws to make 3D collages!
For such a simple activity this straw mosaic art was really creative and interesting and the results look super cool!
We think they look a bit like gemstones or crystals.
We’d love to see your straw mosaics.
If you have a go at making some straw mosaics we’d love to see some pictures! Tag me on instagram (@picklebums) or share a photo on our facebook page.
Looking for more cool, gluing and collage activities? Try one of these…
Wow Kate!!!! So gorgeous.
Great idea! I’m looking for school holiday art activities.
It’s amazing.
These are wonderful! I wonder if cutting straws inside plastic baggies would work? It may make them super static-y though. Also, I wonder if attaching then to green floral foam would work?
Cutting in a bag is a great idea!
I think floral foam could work great. I’ve seent something similar using play dough or air drying clay as a base which I think would be cool too!
Looks so lovely (I realllly mean it) but unfortunately not environmentally friendly at all. There are cities around the US no longer selling or handing out plastic straws or bags for this reason.
I only use paper straws in my classroom now (I am a maker/tech teacher).
Yes, buying plastic straws for projects is not very environmentally friendly now that we know the impact that have. But you can see that this post was written back in 2017, so now that we know better we can do better. While we used a lot of recycled plastic straws for this project, you can definitely do this project with paper straws, or you could just give it a miss if it doesn’t fit well within your values.