This was not so much a craft that Travis and I did together, but more of a toy that I put together for him. It mainly involves scissors and hot glue, so definitely grown-up materials! If your kids are8 years old and up, they can help out with the hot glue under careful supervision.

I had actually hoped to put the little canoe together around Thanksgiving, when Travis learned about Native Americans and the holiday. But alas, at the time I didn’t have enough wine corks! With a trove of 5 corks now on hand, I finally got around to making the canoe. If you want a bigger boat, use up to 8 wine corks.

To start, I drew a canoe shape on white paper, and traced that two times on brown craft foam. Cut out; these are the two sides of the canoe.

To make your boat buoyant, hot glue together the wine corks in a row. Travis did venture over to see this stage, thinking it was pretty neat!

Glue the corks near the bottom edge of one canoe half, then add drops of glue to each cork and press on the other half of the canoe.

Seal the top edges of the canoe together with more hot glue.

You can assemble your canoe’s passenger from additional shapes of craft foam. I snipped out red rectangles for body and arms, a brown square for the face, and a larger square of black foam for the hair, all of which I attached together with hot glue.

Cut fringe in the black foam for a cute touch.

Now we needed to test if he would float! To Travis’s delight, the canoe worked great.

It wasn’t long before he grew impish and wanted to see if our little foam person could swim.

This being closer to Christmas than Thanksgiving, he turned the canoe into Santa’s “sleigh” during his bath. Bath was nearly double its normal length because he was having so much fun. However you use it, a great floating toy.