Let’s be creative with materials at home

For #ZoologyLive we challenge you to use the materials around you to create a creature!

There are many materials, containers and items that we put into the recycle bin. While recycling is one way to look after our planet, they can also make excellent crafting materials.

The natural world also provides us with some excellent crafting ingredients. Discover new colours and textures by collecting these up during a walk or in your garden.

The tips below will help you to get started and how to enter our prize draw…

Challenge 1: materials inside

Collect up materials to use from inside your home, like plastic bottles, scrap paper or paperclips. Use these to create a sculpture of an animal you saw this week.

Top tips:

• Empty plastic bottles make excellent animal bodies.
• Use string, paper, ribbon or anything colourful to give your animal some patterns.
• Pritt stick is an excellent glue to use for this craft, but knotting materials around your sculpture can work well too.
• Your creature can also be dismantled and recycled again, helping to care for our planet.

Challenge 2: nature’s materials

Collect up materials from your garden or on a walk outside. Look for different colours and textures. What animal will you make? Once collected, choose your background and lay down your collage to create an animal you have spotted recently.

Top tips:

• Collect dry materials such as leaves, twigs, petals, stones.
• Make sure that your materials are already on the ground. We don’t want to damage any living plants.
• Choose a background made of one colour. This can be the ground outside, a piece of paper, a sheet or even a tablemat!
• Do not use glue. Once you have created your nature make, you can take a photograph of what you have made and then return your materials to the outdoors ready for nature to make use of them.

Take part in our Recycled Make Challenge and you could win one of our Minibeast Field Kits complete with magnifying pot and ID guides. To enter, either upload a photograph of your make with the #ZoologyLive to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, remembering to tag us in your message, or email it to umzc@zoo.cam.ac.uk with the subject line Zoology Live Recycled Make Challenge.

We will be showing some of the best makes on Saturday’s Zoology Live at 3pm, and also uploading your pictures onto our Online Community Gallery at https://museumofzoologyblog.com.

See the Zoology Live: goes digital programme here

The competition closes at midnight on Sunday 28 June. A prize draw of all entries made will then take place, and the winner of that will be contacted by the Museum.  

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The Museum will only use any personal data provided to inform you if you have been successful in the prize draw. They will not be shared with anyone else. For more details about how we handle your personal information and your rights under data protection legislation please see the University’s Information Compliance pages: https://www.information-compliance.admin.cam.ac.uk/.