Giant DIY Spirograph Art
by
Tova Pearl
5 Materials
My kids are crazy about spirograph art (a.k.a. those teeny tiny sets with two plastic gears, where you put a pen in the smaller one and revolve it inside the larger one to make really cool spiral pictures.) So i thought - wouldn't it be cool if we could make a HUGE one? There was nothing on pinterest to help me out, which was really surprising, so my son and i went to the craft store looking for things to make our gears from and voila! an easy hack was born:
Get a hula hoop and a few frisbees (we have loads in the house, so i chose these two), plus a drill / bits, and a hot glue gun.
And some craft paper with as large and as strong corrugation as you can find. Cut it into strips about 1.5-2in wide. Set it aside for later on.
Next, you'll want to drill some holes in your frisbees that will be big enough to hold a marker snugly. I started with some pilot holes, spaced out over the frisbee.
(put some wood or other scrap under here)
I kept enlarging the holes till they were just big enough for some thin markers we had on hand. Pro tip: if your frisbee is made of a brittle plastic, you can put a little dish soap down on the drill bit to keep the plastic from cracking. (Most frisbees won't need this though).
Now hot glue the corrugated cardboard strips to the inside of the hula hoop, and to the outside of the two frisbees and you're ready to go!
here you can see the frisbee with holes.... I'm gluing the paper to the outside of it.
Now the fun begins! Start to draw your spiral art by putting a marker in the hole and moving the frisbee around the perimeter of the hula hoop, holding the hoop steady while your kid draws. Watch the crazy pattern..... and repeat with another color, from a different hole in the frisbee. The innermost holes draw more even circles and the outer holes draw flower shapes.
after two colors it looked like this.....
The baby tried to get in on the action.....
And here is one after a few more colors. Cool, huh?
I'm pretty sure we'll be doing this again lots of times :-) so I would've liked to find a more durable material than the corrugated paper for making our gears, but this was all we found. Anyone have any ideas? thanks!
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2 of 52 comments
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Check your hardware supply store. I am fairly certain that I saw some corrugated materials that was metal. It was flat strips.
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What about using corrugated tubing , I'm not sure whether it comes in many diameters but if split lengthways it should fit both the hoolahoop and the frisbees. On the hoop you'd have the seam on the outside so that it didn't interfere with the motion of the frisbees...?
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Might be fun to us a hole cutter in frisbee to make it large enough to do sidewalk chalk outside