What do you do when you don’t have enough corks to make sailing boats for a “cork sailing boats” art activity that is coming up? Look for alternatives, of course! After visiting a hardware store and sharing my dilemma of finding corks, a helpful assistant suggested cork tiles. And from there an idea was born to make sailing boats from cork tiles.
You’ll need:
- One cork tile per boat
- Two skewer sticks per boat
- Paper sail
Sail template
- Sticky tape
- Wax crayons
- Food colouring mixed with water for the colour wash
- Sponge
- Paint for the boat
Method:
1.Cork tiles are pretty thin, so I decided to layer them. From one cork tile I cut four boat shapes using a curvilinear triangle for the boat head.
2. Skewer sticks were used to join the layers together. My initial idea was to have two sails.
My five year old son had some other design ideas, however. He bent one of the sticks over to create a triangle which would support one sail. This looked much better.
3. The children coloured the sails with wax crayon. We then used a sponge to colour wash over the wax with a mixture of water and food colouring.
4. The children painted the boats and sticks.
5. After the boats and sails had dried we put them together.
6. We went outside and had fun sailing them in water.
To make the boat more water proof use acrylic paint and layer thick sticky tape around the sail.
