How to Make Animal Crossing Gyroids 4

I’m joining up again this week with the amazing folks over at Geek Blogs Unite.   This month’s geeky theme is all about gaming.  Luckily for me, Wonder Boy and I have been busy making some epic Animal Crossing gyroids to scatter around the house.   It’s such a simple and fun craft, any Animal Crossing fan can make them.   

These Animal Crossing gyroids are a fun and easy craft made with toilet paper tubes.

If you aren’t familiar with the Animal Crossing games, gyroids are quirky pieces of furniture that you place in your home.  Gyroids are buried underground in the game, and you can find them just by digging them up.  Each gyroid is unique in appearance. Plus,  they each have their own “tune” that they play.  Multiple gyroids placed in your home will create an interesting gyroid concert that plays each time you go home.

I think this gyroid is surprised to to find himself in the flower pot.

Wonder Boy loves finding new gyroids when playing Animal Crossing.  With each one that he uncovers, he rushes home to place them in the room to see what they look like and how they sound.  

The gyroids we’ve made with toilet paper rolls may not look exactly like you find in the game, but they are definitely unique.  Thankfully they don’t make any noise though, we would never get any sleep.  

Supplies needed for Animal Crossing gyroids

• Toilet paper rolls
• Craft paint
• Origami paper (1 piece for each gyroid you make)
• Pipe cleaners
• Large mouth glass or cup
• Washi tape (optional)
• Scotch tape
• Black Sharpie marker
• Hot glue and hot glue gun
• Pencil
• Scissors

Instructions for making Animal Crossing gyroids

To start, pick out a piece of origami paper for each gyroid you plan to make.  Now if you don’t have any origami paper on hand you can use cardstock or construction paper for the gyroid top.  Oh yeah, you want to choose your origami paper first because the rest of the project is based on the colors in the paper.

Pick a paint color that coordinates with the origami paper.  You then need to paint your toilet paper roll with the selected paint.  We struggled with painting our toilet paper rolls until we figured out that you can place two fingers inside the roll to hold it up.

Painting the gyroid’s body

You will need two coats of paint on your toilet paper roll, but you can move on to the next step and come back to the painting once they dry a bit.  

Next, grab your piece of origami paper and cup and trace a circle on the back of the paper to start the gyroid top.  The cup we used was about 3 ½ inches in diameter.  It seemed to make the perfect size top.   

Here’s Wonder Boy tracing a cup to make the Gyroid’s top

Cut out the circle you just traced.  To change the circle into a cone you’ll need to cut about halfway into the circle as pictured below.   Next, bring the cut sides of your circle together and slightly overlap them.  We just secured the cone with scotch tape.  

Here are the three easy steps for making your gyroid’s top

Now if you don’t have any origami paper you can always make the Animal Crossing gyroid top with construction paper.   Or, you can use card stock and paint the cardstock the same color as the gyroid.   If you do decide to paint cardstock cut your circle our THEN paint it.  

After you’ve made your cone, it’s a good time to go back and put a second coat of paint on your toilet paper rolls.  

We’re now ready to make the arms for the Animal Crossing gyroids with pipe cleaners.   We actually made our arms 2 different ways.  Wonder Boy liked the idea of playing with the pipe cleaners so he wanted twisted arms.   I wanted to keep it simple so my arms were not twisted.  You can make them either way, just know you’ll need two arms for each gyroid.  

• Method 1:   Cut about 2 inches of pipe cleaner.   Bend the pipe cleaner at a 90 degree angle.   Voila arm!  Make another arm.  
• Method 2:  Cut about 2 inches of pipe cleaner.   Make another 2 inch piece of pipe cleaner in the same color or a complimentary color.  Twist the two pieces of pipe cleaner together.  Bend the twisted pipe cleaner at a 90 degree angle.   Voila, twisted arm!   Make a second arm.

Poke a small hole into the sides of the gyroid with a sharp pokey thing.  We used Perler Bead tweezers, but a tack or thin nail would work nicely too.  

Once you have the holes you can just work the pipe cleaner into the hole to give the gyroid arms.

You can see the small hole I poked into the toilet paper tube. Just stick the arms inside of it.

You’re now ready to add a face to your Animal Crossing gyroid.   Take a black Sharpie marker and draw your face onto the center of the gyroid.  Since gyroids are all unique, their faces should be too.   The great thing is that the faces are just simple ovals, circles, squares and rectangles.   They don’t even have a nose.  You can see what we did in the image below.

Easy to make Gyroids from toilet paper tubes.

Animal Crossing gyroids all have some kind of detail on their base.   In reality, it just makes the gyroid bigger at the bottom, but we decided to give your gyroid some flair by adding washi tape.   We even used some leftover glitter tape that we used when making our Minecraft Glitter Ornaments.  But, I digress.   All you need to do is pick a color that will compliment your gyroid and wrap it around the bottom of the gyroid.  

If you don’t have washi tape a cool idea could also be to take a piece of the left origami paper and cut a thin strip.   Glue that strip of origami paper around the bottom of the gyroid.  Then his top would match his bottom.   

Our final step in making these wacky Animal Crossing gyroids is gluing on the top.  Just put a bead of hot glue around the top of your decorated toilet paper tube and plop the origami cone on top.  Easy peasy!   

You’re Animal Crossing gyroids are now ready to be placed around the house as your very own Animal Crossing decoration.  

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