Accordion Flamingo Party Decorations

I love flamingos, so you'd think they'd show up in my crafting a lot. But I've only made one flamingo craft before. Time to change that! The inspiration for this flamingo came from a fuchsia accordion paper lantern a friend randomly gave me (affiliate links here and throughout the post). 

-----------

Accordion Flamingo Party Decorations

Materials: 

• fuchsia accordion paper lantern
• cardstock or construction paper: fuchsia, light pink, black, and blue
• large googly eye
• wooden skewers
• craft glue

Steps:

Decide whether you want your flamingo to be one-sided or if it will be viewed from multiple sides. Mine is one-sided (since it's hanging against a fence). If yours will be two-sided, simply double everything and sandwich it together when you assemble it. 

For one side, you will need one neck/head and two wings (fuchsia), two legs with knobby knees (light pink), one beak and two wingtips (black), and one googly eye. I cut my shapes using scratch paper to figure out the size, then used that as a template for the colored paper. 

Glue the beak and the eye to the face and the wingtips to the wings. Glue the neck to a wooden skewer. If your cardstock / construction paper is not very rigid and you're making a single-sided flamingo, you may need to reinforce the neck. I used a scrap. 

Bend a small flap at the top of each leg, apply glue, and stick the legs to the bottom side of the closed accordion lantern. Bend one leg if you'd like. 

Poke a second skewer through the center of the accordion lantern, then glue a wing to each end of the skewer. I reinforced them with tape so they wouldn't come off when the glue was still wet. 

Poke the flamingo head skewer into the front hanger hole on top of the lantern. 

You can leave your flamingo like this, or tear blue paper to make water for the flamingo to stand in. I taped the 'water' to the fence then tucked the flamingo's feet behind the 'water.'

This makes me want to throw a flamingo-themed party! Or, at the very least, to make more flamingo projects to add to my Bird Crafts page.