Grecian Vase from Paper Mache

The kids (twins are almost 6 and little guy is almost 4) have been learning about ancient Greece all month using Story of the World and other sources.  One of their favorite crafts so far have been these neat Grecian vases made from paper mache.  Here's what we did...

The body of each vase is a balloon, with an empty applesauce cup for the base and a cut plastic bottle for the top.  We used cardboard for the handles, but in the future will probably leave those out since they were hard to work with.  We didn't have any newspaper for traditional paper mache, so the kids tore strips from construction paper.

For the paper mache paste, I mixed 1 part flour (gluten free pancake mix was all we had) to two parts warm water.  The kids had a great time dipping their construction paper scraps into the paste and covering their vases.

After the vases dried, they were decorated (with regular poster-paint).  The girls were very excited about the results and said that they looked like real artifacts.