Prior to having kids of our own, whenever I held a baby in church and didn’t have any toys to entertain them with, I would always give them my lipstick tubes from my purse to play with.  The babies could never open the tube, but they loved holding it in their hands.  I now cringe a little, knowing that those tubes had not been properly sanitized, but I can claim ignorance.  :)

As I used up the last bit of my lipstick, I decided I would use it to make a puppet of sorts.  After all, twisting the tube offers some great fine motor practice!  Just a warning, however, the items that go into the lipstick tube must be about the diameter of your pinky.  Obviously, this is not a toy for babies (or any child who still puts items in his/her mouth).  But it is sure to entertain and surprise your preschooler the next time you are in a place where you must be quiet!

Here’s what you’ll need:  lipstick tube (cleaned out…it’s harder than you think), the smallest pom-pom you can find, scissors, a pipecleaner, and a hot glue gun.  

1.  Clean out the lipstick tube.  A q-tip worked well, but I ended up wrapping my pinky with a paper towel and twisting to clean it out.

2.  Wrap the pipe cleaner as tightly around as you can on one end.  Once you have it as tall as you’d like (mine was about 1 inch), cut it.  This will be the ‘stand’ for the pom-pom.

3.  Hot glue the pipe cleaner into the lipstick tube.

4. Hot glue the pom-pom on next and then the googly eye!

Twist and put the cap on to take along!

I’m envisioning doing one for each color…but then again, that would require me to go through a lot of lipstick!