I was recently in charge of a Girl Scout meeting for my oldest girl scout to help the girls earn their Philanthropy badge. Well, me and my daughter were in charge but you know how that goes… 😉 We needed an activity for the girls during the meeting and I felt like this giving jar was the perfect idea. This jar is a place where they can save up their coins to donate to a charity of their choosing. We talked about what charities already exist out there and about how a dime doesn’t buy much here but in a third world country could buy a child a breakfast of oatmeal and such. I also had some magazines and had them cut out some wants vs needs and glue them to poster boards but I would say they were more excited about the jars.
What you’ll need:
sponge brushes (to paint on the mod podge) Found a pack of them at Wal-Mart for cheap.
mason jars (pint-sized – got from Wal-Mart b/c they had some that didn’t have any engravings on them)
tissue paper (multi-colored)
mod podge
card stock (multi-colored for the lids)
box cutter (to cut the slit in the lid for the coins)
The girls were excited to make their jars. I cut the circles out of tissue paper beforehand. At first, I bought a circle punch from Michael’s and that was worthless. It kept tearing the tissue paper and not cutting then eventually broke from too much use (or frustration on my part?!?!) so I had to abandon that idea. In the end, I found the best way to cut out the circles was to fold the tissue paper over itself multiple times and trace a 1.5 inch circle which I first cut out of card stock (using my whole punch when it was still alive). Then, I traced that on the folded tissue paper and cut out multiple circles at a time that way. You will need some strong scissors – I used the kitchen shears b/c I wanted to cut as many circles as humanly possible at one time.. :-p They don’t have to be perfect – no one will notice..
First, you paint mod podge on a section of the jar using a sponge brush (it dries quick so just one small section at a time), then stick the circles to it, then paint the mod podge over the circles and repeat. It is pretty easy. Just keep overlapping the circles so that every inch of the jar is covered. For the top, I just cut a circle out of card stock and used a box cutter to make the coin slit in it. Wallah! Pretty cute, right? You could also just use it for a pencil holder or you could do the same thing with a vase from the dollar store. Whatever you want. I need to make one using different colored tissue paper for my office..
Here’s a link to the video that shows you the tehnique:
And here’s a website where I initially found the philanthropy badge information and the common sense jar. I kind of combined the two ideas:
http://followthejrleader.blogspot.com/2014/03/brownie-philanthropy-badge.html