Chandelier with Upcycled Materials

Every so often, we get the opportunity to partner with another school in our district for a project. This was one of those times and it actually turned out quite nicely. In fact, the kids did such a great job, the finished products hung from our town's art museum's ceiling for a few months. You can imagine how great we all felt knowing that a collaboration like this could come together and be showcased in an actual museum. This is easily something you could coordinate with another school or district in your town, as well as with a local art (or another type) of museum.

Benefits of Using Upcycled Materials

Upcycled materials are also known as recycled materials, but either way you choose to look at it, it comes with several benefits. For starters, instead of throwing things away and contributing to the overabundance of trash, upcycled materials help the environment. It gives students a hands-on lesson of the three R’s: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Another benefit of using these types of materials is the creativity it sparks. You’ll see that for this project, we used old plastic bottles. There are a number of things you can do with these!

Recycled or reused objects can also make for some pretty eclectic art pieces. There are well-known artists who have made it their life’s work to create art from what others may consider trash. From broken glass art to torn paper art, you’d be surprised at what students (and adults) can come up with.

Last but not least, developmentally speaking, using recycled (or upcycled) materials helps students work on their small and large motor skills. They will need to use a certain level of hand-eye coordination as well as a thought process in order to come up with a unique piece of art. Keep reading to see what we came up with using recycled plastic bottles.

Making a Chandelier with Upcycled Materials

In order for this project to work, our students’s parents brought in plastic bottles. These are what we used to create a “plastic bottle” flower art. In addition to the plastic bottles, we also used the following supplies:

• liquid watercolors

• mixing mediums

• hot glue sticks

• hot glue gun

• fishing line

• hula hoops*

*Instead of having to buy new hula hoops, we were able to snag the ones our PE teachers were getting rid of. Check with different departments in your school to see what they’re tossing. Instead of throwing it away, store it in your art closet for possible use in later projects.

How to Make the Project

We started by cutting the tops off of the plastic bottles so it would be easier to make the slits for the flower-like petals. Once we had a good amount cut, we used liquid watercolors and mixing mediums to paint the plastic. It held up pretty well because the mixing mediums have a glue-like quality,

After the paint dried, we hot glued them to fishing line and the fishing line was hot glued to old hula hoops. You can play around with how close or how far apart you glue the plastic bottle flowers on the fishing line. Also give students the opportunity to get creative with their painting. Check out the pictures below to see the different cutting, painting, and gluing jobs our students did.

When everything has been assembled, hang the hula hoops as shown below to display the finished piece of art work!