St. Patrick's Day Crafts: Leprechaun Traps {Craft Tutorial}

This is our first year making leprechaun traps, and let me just say that Lily has been super excited to do this from the moment that we started gathering pebbles to make up our fake gold, to her drawing a schematic of what she wanted the trap to look like, to helping me design the trap.

We took up inspiration from several places, such as:

Root's and Wing's Leprechaun Traps
A Holiday Haven's: Leprechaun Traps that Work
A Holiday Haven's: How to Catch a Leprechaun
Disney Family Fun: To Catch a Leprechaun
Leprechaun Trap Photos

First, we started by talking about leprechauns.  I did a little bit of research ahead of time and picked and chose what our leprechauns would be like.   According to most Leprechaun folklore, any leprechaun, if ever captured by a human, the leprechaun has the magical power to grant three wishes in exchange for their release.  I decided this would be our reasoning why we should catch a leprechaun.  But why would the leprechaun be coming to our house anyway?

Well, Saint Patrick's day is an Irish holiday, and a darn good reason to dye rivers green, imho.  And while we're dying rivers green, why not invite the leprechauns in to our homes to steal our precious  gold?  Sounds like a great idea.  My four year old has been asking these sorts of questions, and I simply tell her that leprechauns are tricky like that.  So immediately, of course, she was on board with making the leprechaun traps.

First, we set out making a schematic for our trap:

Ok.  This was a great start.  It engaged her for a while, helped her practice her writing, and she had fun explaining what everything was.

We found a box that was perfect for the trap and she set about painting that while I prepped the stuff to paint our fake gold.  We had gathered some pebbles on our trip to the park the other day, I brought these home, washed them and they were ready to go.

I dumped them in a clean dry cottage cheese container that I had been saving to reuse in some craft projects.  Then I added a few drops of gold paint...

Then we shook them up, and dumped them on some aluminum foil to dry.

We built a simple cage made out of popsicle sticks and glued some poly fib*r*fill to the outside, and glued the rainbow on top of that.  We tied a string to the top of our cage so that the trap would actually work.

You can't really see the cage in this picture, and that's the point.  You don't want to give the trap away to the leprechaun, do you?

Overall, she and I both had fun with this project, and we both had fun making a working trap.  She thought it was hilarious that it actually worked when I made her take the gold and test it.

It will also be fun when we set it up on St. Patrick's day and see if we catch a leprechaun, or if he gets away and leaves us a special treat.  (Either way it will be cool!)

What are you and your family doing for St. Patrick's Day Crafting activities?  I'd love to hear about them!

I'm linking up to these St. Patrick's Day linky parties!

Link up here if you did something cool for St. Patrick's Day!!