This adorable faux succulent will have you reusing all of your old egg cartons

Flex your creative muscles and save old egg cartons from the recycle bin with this fun succulent craft. The finished product brightens up a shelf and requires no maintenance or watering. As a bonus, it’s a simple activity for entertaining kids while teaching them about eco-friendly values.

Invite the little ones in your life to help you make a whole garden of adorable succulents. They’ll love looking at pictures of different plants to make, cutting out the leaves and painting them. You can even be in charge of the glue gun while they decide how you should assemble them. When your garden is complete, have fun pretending to water them together.

Materials
- Egg carton
- Scissors
- Acrylic paint, green
- Small paintbrush
- Gel pen, white
- High-temperature glue gun
- Hot glue sticks
- Small planter

Instructions
1. Cut out the center of an egg carton’s lid or any part of the carton that’s flat. From that, cut out about 13 or 14 pieces shaped like leaves of a succulent. For visual interest, vary the sizes of the leaves.

2. Paint the leaves green. Allow the paint to dry. It’s very important that the paint is completely dry before moving on to the next step.

3. With the gel pen, draw horizontal stripes around both sides of each leaf.

4. Glue the succulent together. To do this, start by standing up five leaves and gluing the bottoms together to make a circle. Glue leaves to the outside of the circle on top of places where the inner leaves are connected. Glue a few leaves to the inside of the circle.

5. When you’ve glued all the leaves together, bend the tops of the leaves slightly to give the succulent more dimension.

6. Place the succulent in a small planter. Display on a shelf next to a few other accessories and enjoy!