Toilet Paper Roll Chicken Craft

Here’s an ADORABLE chicken craft that kids can make out of a toilet paper roll!

This chicken craft is perfect for a farm unit, an art class, or a rainy day at home. Our family keeps chickens for the eggs, so we had a great time making this craft! We made our chickens to match two of the breeds we have.

This project idea actually came from an AI picture that I saw on Facebook, haha. A page shared some “craft ideas” that were CLEARLY AI generated. The chicken idea was adorable, but also impossible to make.

Here’s the picture I saw:

These are cute ideas, but there are some obvious clues that they are AI. The little bird in the top left is floating in mid-air. The yarn on the peacock and on the owl is clearly defying gravity haha. The chicken’s beak is attached to… ? And I was pretty sure that the chicken would not be able to balance like that on its pipe cleaner feet. It turns out that I was right about that!! But, we made a workable version of a toilet paper roll chicken that turned out pretty darn cute if I do say so myself.

Ready to make your own? Follow our easy instructions!

Supplies Needed for a Toilet Paper Roll Chicken:

Toilet paper rolls – one per chicken
Orange pipe cleaners – two per chicken
Cardboard from a cereal box
Red felt
Googly eyes
Paint
Hot glue gun
Scissors

Step 1: Paint a toilet paper roll. Use whatever colors you want your chicken to be!

Step 2: Fold two orange pipe cleaners into the chicken’s feet. I trimmed some excess off each pipe cleaner, but you’ll be using more than half of the pipe cleaner so you really can’t get two feet out of one.

Start by bending one end of the pipe cleaner into three toes as shown below.

Then, to connect the toes together into a foot, fold the long end of the pipe cleaner up and over the space between the left toe and the middle toe. Bend it down again.

Make two feet and trim the legs to your desired length.

Step 3: Cut out a comb and wattle from red felt. Then cut out a cardboard beak and paint it orange.

Find some googly eyes.

Step 4: Flatten one end of the toilet paper roll. This will be the head. Use scissors to trim a small triangle off the bottom of the head, and a larger triangle off the top of the head.

Step 5: Use hot glue to glue the comb and beak to the inside of the toilet paper roll. Then add more glue and squeeze that end of the toilet paper roll closed.

Step 6: Cut out some wings from cardboard (we used a cereal box) and paint them to match your chicken. Glue them to the body. Glue the pipe cleaner legs to the body. Glue the wattle and the googly eyes to the chicken’s head.

Step 7: Add some red yarn (or white, or whatever color your chicken is) to make tail feathers.

Glue a penny inside the chicken’s rear end. This will make it balance in that adorable pecking position!

This is what chickens spend nearly all their time doing, so the pose really makes them look like chickens. However, they will just tip over on their heads without the penny there for balance.

Now make more chickens in other colors! So fun!

We wanted some grass to add to our pretend chicken yard, so I cut some rings from toilet paper rolls and then wrapped green craft foam around them. I used scissors to cut blades of grass. So easy!