Dragons are really an important part of Chinese mythology, so the next time you get ready to celebrate the Chinese New Year I’m going to give you a project that you could use in your celebration.

We’re going to make little dragon puppets, so what you’re going to need to make this puppets are the following. You’re going to need some tissue paper colored tissue paper. We’re going to need a Dowel rod which is what we’re going to put the dragon on. You need a stapler, pair of scissors. Some glitter, some bubbles for the eyes decorating the dragon. Some Polymer medium we’re going to use with the glitter so we can make them a bright glittery face and you need some pieces of construction paper.

I chose yellow and brown of course you can choose any colors you want. The pieces have been cut to about three inches across and they’re 24 inches long. If you don’t have 18X24 inch colored paper you can use any size and you’ll just have to staple more pieces together that’s all, so don’t worry about it there’s always ways to make adjustments.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take these long pieces I have and I’m going to start to staple them together because we want to make a nice long dragon okay.

Actually I think I’m going to go a little bit longer, and actually what we’re going to do is we’re going to do an accordion fold. We’re going to start with the pieces of paper one cross over the other one, and then we’re going to fold this one, okay. This one over and you just go back and forth. Okay, you can see that we’ve got rid of a lot of that paper and I’m still folding back and forth.

And now you’ll see why I trimmed down the paper at the beginning because what I was trying to do is allow the dragon to get a little bit smaller towards his tail. So you can actually see the pieces folding on top of each other and they’re gradually getting a little bit smaller, so that was the reason why we did that trimming. I’m going to staple this at the end here, and we can cut a little bit of this off. And you’ll see that we’ve got this long accordion shaped here, okay.

Now what we’re going to do, this is actually going to be the dragon’s face here. And if you want you can shape this change the shape of it a little bit. And we’re going to take some tissue paper and pick out a couple of different colors here and cut some real thin strips of the end here and this is going to be the fire that comes out of the dragon’s mouth. I will just going to make this come to a point so it looks like flames staple this little part here because this is going to go inside of his mouth here. And that we’re going to put in there with some hot glue. And then I’m going to push it all the way back inside of there so it just kind of drapes out like that. And we’re going to cover the face with some glitter and then I’m either going to use—well maybe we’ll use some of these googley eyes from our little box of bubbles here.

So first I’m going to hot glue this on and so and then I’m going to use some Polymer medium I tend to use Polymer for a lot of different things. And you’ll going to paint some on. I’m going to paint some around the eyes and I’m going to leave the tissue paper. And whenever you use glitter you want to make certain that you’ve got a piece of paper underneath. And I think we’re going to use gold. You want paper underneath to catch all the excess glitter because then it makes it a lot easier to get it back into the container. So there we got our little dragon’s face, okay.

Now we’re going to take the Dowel rod and put some glue hot glue on it. And attach it so it’s hidden inside. We are going to add one last feature to our dragon. We’re going to make some wings for him, and basically, what I’m going to do here the shape you know you don’t have to worry about the shape that you choose being perfect. And I don’t have a pattern for it I’m just going to cut a wide strip of —I’ve got two colors here, so that when they’re help up to the light you can like see the different colors and let’s see. I’m going to pinch the tissue paper together, so the wings look like so and then I will twist so it stays together. And find a good spot and then pinch this one you prone out so that you have like little plates in them and twist it and there we have our little flying dragon for the next time you’re on a parade for the Chinese New Year.