Pearl makes monsters

For Halloween this year I'm giving out monsters; paper monster puppets, to be exact. I want to encourage kids to be creative and imaginative, not to eat stuff that's bad for them.
A few years ago I made these and gave out a few to kids...


This year I'm making more. And hoping to corrupt others to doing so too!!

You need a piece of paper, scissors.
The paper will get cut to be square, folded to have creases going certain ways to make it fold right and to mark where you are folding to. I marked my folds with a pen so you could see them you do NOT want to do that, it was just for pictures.  
In Origami, folds that poke up are HILL folds, folds that go down are VALLEY folds.  The folds on this that go diagonal I call X folds, the ones that go up and down and across I call + folds.  
I'll put any needed commentary between the pictures....
You start by making the X and + folds




Then lay the page right, and fold corners to center, flip it, corners to center again. Straighten and fluff it, and it's done.







If you look at that and think "that's HARD!!" I think that if you try it, you'll find it makes sense really fast. Variants on this have been used by young girls in school for many years, takes a 3rd grade girl a couple minutes to learn this.

I wanted to make a bunch, so I got 15 sheets of paper, folded the first corner and cut off the ends, then timed how long it took me to fold the stack.  14 minutes, so each one took me a bit less than a minute.

15 sheets of paper

A neatly folded stack

Ready to be decorated

Decorating them will take me much longer than folding did :D
I'll post pics as they get done.
They need eyes, tongues, fangs, ears, spots, stripes whiskers etc....

I think this is a MUCH better thing to give out for Halloween!

And I got tired of making them quickly, so this is what I came up with with...

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with the monsters of the graduating class of 2022!!

Oh I remember making those! Although mine were never in pretty colours - just whatever paper I could get hold of. I seem to remember that we used them for fortune telling, there was a rhyme you could say and then you unfolded one of the flaps (which had little messages written underneath). Of course since you were the one that had written the message, you could always try again if you didn't like the fortune you were about to unfold.
Anyone else do that? Remember the rhyme?

I know a dozen versions of the things that were said for fortune telling. They are a regional thing, different everywhere.

I'm planning to open these up and write cool quotes in them.  The last batch only said something like "Hey! get out of my mouth!" I think I can do better than that  :D

I LOVE this idea, they are adorable.  When my daughter was little she would have loved to get one of these.  Then probably gone home and "reverse engineered" it to make a dozen variations of her own.   Her favorite "gift" when she was little was a new pad of construction paper and a roll of scotch tape <3   Thanks for sharing these.   No kids do trick-or-treat in my neighborhood or I'd be very tempted to join in on this!

Heather Staas wrote:I LOVE this idea, they are adorable.  When my daughter was little she would have loved to get one of these.  Then probably gone home and "reverse engineered" it to make a dozen variations of her own.   Her favorite "gift" when she was little was a new pad of construction paper and a roll of scotch tape <3   Thanks for sharing these.   No kids do trick-or-treat in my neighborhood or I'd be very tempted to join in on this!

I have also been known to keep extra ones in my purse and give them out at the grocery store etc :D  
No rule says you have to have a socially acceptable reason to give out monsters.
:D

That's also how I know so many versions of the rhymes and games, the mom or grandma of the kids in the stores show me, I ask. I always ask the mother quietly before I offer to a kid, so if she said no, he isn't saddened.  No one has said no yet, and most have been amused and showed me their version.

and a silly story about these things...
When I was 11 or so the whole family went a fairly nice restaurant, I doubt it was high end, but better than us 5 kids got to go to normally. There were cloth napkins at each place, they were square. I folded mine into a puppet (it was big, they good sized napkins.) My dad took it away from me. I thought I was in trouble. The waiter came to take our order and dad used the puppet to tell the waiter our order :D

Pearl Sutton wrote:The waiter came to take our order and dad used the puppet to tell the waiter our order :D

Your Dad was great! Thanks for sharing Pearl.

So how did Halloween night go? Were the kids all asking for seconds?

How did the cute lil' monsters go over, Pearl??

Oh yes, the monsters were a hit, I knew they would be, I've done variants on this before.
What I found interesting was I had them on a tray, lined up like the pic above where they are posed in lines. I'd ask the kids "Which one is yours?" and they all knew exactly which one they wanted, no hesitation, no thinking on it.

Not a single kid questioned that they got no candy. They were thrilled with the monsters.
I call this a win!

:D