Craft: Making Wall.E Robot with Recycled Materials

Everyone, please meet the new member of our family! *smile*

Ever since the day my boys watched Wall.E for the first time and promptly produced some fantastic drawings of this adorable invention (and more here), I knew we have to make a Wall.E just to make them smile. 

I thought of the design for a long time and couldn't find suitable materials for all the parts. After a few months of saving a bag of empty yogurt pots, some boxes of different sizes, corrugated cardboards and paper rolls, we finally sat down to complete it. 

Wall.E was assembled (with a LOT of help from me in the stapling and taping of parts) and painted over several evenings and finally, two weeks ago, we sighed a relief to see him completed. 

We have very few photos of the creation process as all our 3 pairs of hands (kids' and mine) were too full experimenting the different ways to assemble the materials for a realistic look.

After Chipsy painted the Wall.E, Marcus wanted to make the flap. As Chipsy put it, without the flap, how can Wall.E crush the garbage and hence be useful? True... hmm.. 

But by then, I was too tired and brain-dead to think of what else we can use as a flap that can open and close and ideally covers a squarish hollow in Wall.E's body. So I persuaded Marcus to just draw in the flap with a marker. Heehee... 

The strange thing is, a fortnight has passed but the kids still think Wall.E is too precious for any rough play. It just sits cosily in a corner of our living room greeting the boys everyday and they just refer to it with polite grins. 

I hope the kids will get over its delicate features soon and take it around for some imaginery play. After all, it is a robot, or supposed to be.

The sooner the parts come loose, the earlier I can replace it with some other 3-dimensional crafts that usually take up too much real estate. For now, Chipsy has decided that he wants to keep Wall.E for at least another 18 years. Hmmm... I hope not!  

Now that we are so in love with 3-D crafts, we have attempted another one. One more step to completion before I blog about it. Then we can go on to make our next one, once I can set aside some 4-6 hours of carefree time.