How to Make a Knight Shield out of Cardboard

You’ll know it’s time to make a knight shield or a sword when your kids start chasing each other through the house screaming and waving whatever strange looking stick they could call a sword.

So I decided it’s time for us to make a knight shield.

And I guess if this noisy fun continues we’ll also make a cardboard sword later 🙂

This is what we used to make this knight shield out of cardboard.

One or two pieces of strong cardboard
A piece of string/rope for the handle
Pen
Utility knife
Optional – silver tape, paint, glue, craft gemstones, colored paper for decoration

Did you notice how many types of knight shields there are out there? You find them round, oval, rectangular, as a triangle … basically lots of shapes and sizes! I didn’t want to get into trouble with the kids because of making the “wrong knight shield”. So I asked the council.

Lukas and Victoria had a small talk, and came back to me with a drawing that looked more or less like the picture below. I then made a template shield from a big piece of paper, they approved it and so we got to work.

Tip: If you want your knight shield to be symmetric, then fold your template paper in 2 and draw half of the shield starting from the fold. Once you cut and unfold the paper, you’ll get a symmetrical knight shield template.

Using the paper template, I traced the shape of the knight shield on one of the pieces of cardboard, and cut the first knight shield shape out.

Tip: If your cardboard is not strong enough, then cut more shields and stick them together (like we did). I use two pieces of cardboard for this knight shield.

For the second shield shape, Victoria traced the shape using the first cardboard knight shield we made. As you can imagine Victoria loved it. I even let her experience cutting with the utility knife, but only for a while as she is not strong enough to cut through the cardboard. And at her age the utility knife is more of a hazard to her than anything else.

Then my 2 eager young artists started with the painting of the knight shields. Lukas got to choose the color … can you guess what his favorite color is? My little 2 year old decided to make a small mess since apparently it’s so much more fun to paint with the fingers than with the brush 🙂

After the paint dried, we started making the knight shield handle. I used a ribbon that Lukas slid through 2 holes and then stapled to make a closed loop. As stapling is so much fun, he stapled a lot … you know, to make sure it won’t open 😉

So we got ourselves 2 painted knight shields out of which one had a cool handle.

Next, using a silver tape, I taped the 2 knight shields together. The kids and myself took turns in holding the knight shield pieces and taping them together.