Craft ideas for kids: No spill pig watering can

Is your toddler as keen on watering the garden as mine are? Do they also get more water on their feet than in the plant pots? Here’s your answer – a cheeky pig watering can made from a recycled plastic milk jug!

This post was inspired by two different craft ideas for kids: a milk jug piggy bank by Kideas and a milk jug watering can. I decided to combine the two and ended up with this!

https://www.instagram.com/p/ckNiZVmejM/

You will need:

a (clean and empty!) large (4 pints or more) milk jug with its cap
4x plastic bottle caps (we used 500ml water bottle caps) to make the trotters (optional)
pink waterproof spray paint for plastic
fine sandpaper
2x pink large foam petal shapes (or a pink foam sheet that you could cut them from)
googly eyes (or permanent marker pens)
a pink pipe-cleaner
a glue gun
a sharp skewer or nail
a cork board / blue tac ball or similar to punch into

COST: a few quid
AGE: younger kids (with help)
TIME: 1 hour or more

How-to:

Screw the cap onto the empty milk jug and mark where you want your pig’s nostrils to be. Unscrew the cap and use the skewer or nail to punch snout holes into it. Put the cork board or ball of blue tac underneath the cap while you make the holes to stop it slipping and protect your work surface.
Prep the milk jug and caps* by sandpapering, then spray-paint them. You may need more than 1 coat.
Bend the very end of the pipe-cleaner over onto itself (to get rid of any sharp pointy bits), then wrap 3/4 of it around your finger to make a corkscrew and roll the remaining 1/4 into a snail/spiral shape which will give you a larger area to glue to the jug pig’s bottom.
Glue the 4 bottle caps to the base of the painted milk jug to make his trotters (see pic below for positioning).
Glue the ears onto either side of the pig’s face and either glue on the googly eyes, or draw them with permanent marker above his snout.
Fill with water, screw the snout on and let your little ones loose!

https://www.instagram.com/p/ckNuErGejf/

In the bottom left picture here, Pickle had just spotted a spider’s web and stopped for closer inspection!

*disappointingly, the acrylic paint that I used didn’t react well with water and started to peel off around the snout. As ever, I turned to Google for answers and apparently the best way to prep a plastic surface to make the paint adhere to it, is with a propane torch & flame-speader attachment – however I would NOT recommend this! Next time I would use a waterproof plastic spray paint, as suggested above (and ‘rough-up’ the surface of the plastic with some fine sandpaper before starting).

Do you have any top tips for painting plastics? I am all ears!