Craft Project: Tissue Paper Bird Nests

I saw a cute idea on The Artful Parent blog to make tissue paper bird nests. A sweet idea to show off some of our decorated Easter eggs. The girls were pretty excited about this project too! So we picked up some tissue paper and I cut it into small squares.

 

Then I mixed up some Elmer's school glue with water. I tried to do equal parts but I was lazy and didn't measure anything out (this could be the reason for this project's downfall...read on).

 

Don't the girls have on super cute aprons?! I made them in about five minutes each out of reusable shopping bags. You can find the tutorial for them here. I didn't sew the ties on yet, but they worked just as well for this project without the ties. I will get them on eventually. :-)

They just crumpled up the squares, dipped them into the glue mixture and placed them around an upside-down saran wrap-covered bowl. Here are the finished nests (mine is the yellow striped one).

We really enjoyed this project and had a lot of fun. BUT. They took FOREVER to dry. In fact, it just didn't seem like they would EVER dry. After 2 1/2 days! Now, my mom's house (where we made this project) is a bit on the humid side. But this was a bit ridiculous. I tried to move them along by using a hair dryer. And when it finally seemed that they were dry enough to remove from the saran wrap. This is what happened....

They completely flopped over. And my poor bowl went from this:

to this:

Sort of an epic fail there. The outside was dry, but the inside by the saran wrap was NOT. I ended up throwing mine away. And I put my girls' each in its own ziploc container and tried to reinforce it with straight Elmer's glue in the spots that weren't holding. I did this a few different times. And finally we ended up with this:

The end result turned out pretty darn cute. But getting there was a lot more work than I anticipated. What went wrong? Well, I'm pretty sure my first mistake was that I watered the glue down too much.  Secondly, I wonder if using Mod Podge would work better? I was also impatient with our drying time because I thought 2-3 days would be enough time for the project and we had to leave my mom's house. So I had to hurry it along a bit. I don't know if we'll try this again. Or what other improvements I could make. But not every project can go perfectly, right? It's all a process. And I sort of like that my girls got to see that the project didn't work very well, but I tried to come up with a way to...in the words of Project Runway's Tim Gunn, "make it work".