Paper Mache - Plate / Bowl

My kids are having a 2-week school holiday. The 1st was spent with their grandparents. Now, comes the 2nd week and our maid is away for a few days. 

My sons wanted to do something I was looking at Google - paper mache. So I decided to guide them doing a bowl each. I guess that's the simplest one. 

1) Select a bowl of choice. 

2) Strip / tear the newspaper. 

3) Wet the newspaper strip and place them one by one, on the back of the bowl.

4) After the whole back of bowl is covered with the wet newspaper strips, start gluing the remaining strips (dry ones) over the wet strips on the back of bowl with homemade glue (Homemade glue recipe). Glue as many layers as you like. The more layer the harder bowl you will get.

(We placed a tray underneath each bowl so that we don't mess the worktop) 

5) Dry bowls under hot sun. 

(We live in a very hot place and it took us about 2-3 hours to dry the paper mache completely) 

6) Remove the paper mache from the mould ( in this case, the bowl ). 

7) Discard also the then wet newspaper strips (now dry). 

8) Cut the edge of the paper mache bowl, then use some small pieces of newspaper to cover the edge to make it smooth. 

9) Dry it again. 

10) Paste one or two more layers of paper pieces of your choice on the paper mache, and in our case, coloured serviette. 

(I find that serviette is more forgiving) 

11) Dry the bowls. I dried them in my air conditioned room and by the time we woke up, the bowls are ready.

These are the bowls my sons have made. 

I hope you will try it for yourselves too. Thank you for reading till now. 

God bless every family.