How to Make a Leprechaun Trap

Learn how to make a leprechaun trap for St. Patrick’s Day! This fun craft project is great for kids and families and makes the holiday magical!

Who knew that my son would have this much fun making a leprechaun trap?! (And by that, I mean have so much fun watching mom build a leprechaun trap…haha.)

Building and setting our DIY trap in hopes of catching a real leprechaun was so magical for my son and made this St. Patrick’s Day so exciting for him. He’s already planning traps for next year.

There are tons of ways to make leprechaun traps, but hopefully sharing ours gives you some fun ideas that you can incorporate in your own trap! Keep reading for the tutorial.

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What is a leprechaun trap?

A leprechaun trap is a playful, homemade craft designed to “catch” a leprechaun–the tiny and mischievous elves from Irish folklore–usually made by kids around St. Patrick’s Day.

Folklore says if you can catch a leprechaun, he must take you to his pot of gold or grant you three wishes. Of course, leprechauns are notoriously elusive and hard to trap, but you still might get rewarded for your effort with some treats left behind (hint: this is your job, mom and dad!). You can even snag this free printable leprechaun letter to go with!

Leprechaun traps are usually made with simple materials like cardboard boxes, string, glittery paper, and anything shiny to attract the sneaky leprechaun (gold coins–real or chocolate coins–are great! Or I even hear some leprechauns like Lucky Charms cereal! 😉).

Let your child use their imagination to come up with their own trap or work together to make one (full disclosure: my 5 year old told me he was tired after the first few minutes and left me to finish the trap on my own, so this definitely turned into a mom project, haha).

If you need further inspiration, this book is one of our favorite St. Patrick’s Day books to read, and this book has 16 different leprechaun trap tutorials to get your wheels spinning!

What you need to make a leprechaun trap

Here are the materials we used in our leprechaun trap (pictured is my entire Dollar Tree haul, but not everything was used for this trap):

• a cardboard box: We used a flat rectangular Amazon box we had on hand. The larger surface was nice to work with, and I liked that it was only a couple inches tall–less cardboard you have to cover! If you want a smaller trap, something like a tissue box would also work.
• shiny green tissue paper: You could also use wrapping paper, but I didn’t want to spend a lot and the dollar store didn’t have any green wrapping. So I used what we had on hand. Green construction paper or even paint would work for covering the box too.
• yellow glitter cardstock (I actually realized later I had this gold glitter cardstock in my stash and should’ve used that!)
• Dollar Tree items: a leprechaun hat, plastic black pot, and faux gold coins
• a wire tinsel shamrock garland: I got this on clearance last year at Michaels for pennies, so we added a little for decoration
• a dowel and string
• popsicle sticks
• pipe cleaners in rainbow colors
• masking tape for the rainbow ends
• cotton balls
• double-sided tape
• hot glue
• scissors

How to make an easy leprechaun trap

There are so many ways to make leprechaun traps, but here is what we did to make ours.

We decided to make our leprechaun-trapping mechanism a simple trap door cut into the cardboard box base. I cut out the cardboard near one end on the top as shown, then taped the box closed, leaving the opening.

Next, we covered the box with shiny green tissue paper. You can just wrap the box like you would a present, ignoring the opening. I only had two sheets of tissue paper, so I actually didn’t worry about wrapping the bottom of the box, just the parts you can see. Double-sided tape worked best for this part and was a lot less messy than glue (by this point, my son had already abandoned me so I guess it didn’t really matter, haha).

Once the box was covered, I felt for the hole and carefully sliced a plus sign through the tissue paper with scissors. This is party of our sneaky design: a hidden trap door that the leprechaun will never see coming!

I free-hand cut a path to the trap door out of glitter cardstock and adhered it to the box with double-sided tape.

And now I apologize for the lack of process photos at this point–I must have gotten lazy (or more likely I just didn’t have a solid plan yet for where this trap was going, haha). But don’t worry! I will still walk you through the rest of the steps!

I thought it would be fun to make a rainbow arch at the entrance of the trap, so I arranged six pipe cleaners in rainbow order and taped the ends together with masking tape. I then curved the pipe cleaners to form an arch. I hot glued the ends of the rainbow to the box, holding it steady until the glue had cooled.

To cover the rainbow ends, I glued several cotton balls down to form clouds.

I glued some of the plastic gold coins along the path and filled one of the black pots with more coins (if you want, you can fill the pot partway with a filler like crumpled paper and you won’t have to use as many coins–this is only bait, after all 😉). We placed the pot of gold just behind the trap door–it gives the leprechaun a reason to walk that far.

For additional decoration, I cut a piece of a wired tinsel shamrock garland and glued it around the sides and back of our leprechaun trap. It forms a border on the trap that makes it feel like a field of shamrocks–hopefully to make any visiting leprechaun feel right at home.

The other part of our trap is the propped-up leprechaun hat, which falls over the trap door when you pull the string which is attached to the dowel. That way, when you hear a leprechaun fall in, you can quickly pull the string to make sure he can’t easily climb out and get away. Fool-proof, I tell you.

I simply tied a length of string to a wooden dowel and carefully propped it against one of the glued-on coins and set the hat on the other end. The wired tinsel strand helped the hat to stay propped up from the back.

One of my favorite additions to our trap is the popsicle stick ladder. This was so easy to do: just lay two vertical sticks on your table and apply dots of hot glue to attach three horizontal sticks. Then hot glue the ladder to the top edge of the box.

Finally, I added two leprechaun signs on popsicle sticks. The ones I used say “FREE gold this way” and “Leprechauns Welcome”. You can get them and more free printable leprechaun signs HERE. I hot glued the cut out signs to the sticks. To make them stand upright in the box, I cut a small slit in the box (just a little smaller than the width of the popsicle stick), wedged the stick down until it was at the height I wanted, and applied hot glue around the base for extra security.

I think everything turned out so perfectly and my son was thrilled with his leprechaun trap!

Here is the trap after a visit from Lucky the Leprechaun:

Of course, I had prepped my son a lot for the inevitable disappointment of not being able to actually catch a leprechaun (they’re much too sneaky). He was a little bummed, but the fun gift basket of green toys and chocolate gold coins was a good consolation prize. (His favorite items were this drawing pad and this green car. His favorite dye-free candy also happens to come in a green package!)

If you want to go the extra mile, don’t forget to include this free printable leprechaun letter with whatever treats you leave. Our leprechaun also left little green footprints on the toilet seat and left the toilet water green, which was pretty amusing to my son.

(I first wrapped the toilet seat with a little bit of cling wrap, then painted the footprints onto that. Very easy and no mess to clean up! I used just a drop or two of this natural food dye for the toilet water and it didn’t stain or leave a ring in the bowl either.)

DIY Leprechaun Trap Ideas

I hope you’ve been inspired to make your own leprechaun trap for St. Patrick’s Day! They can be a little bit of work, but really they don’t have to be super fancy. Kids will just be excited about the prospect of catching a real leprechaun and it’s a fun excuse to surprise your kids with some treats for the holiday.

Even though I know I just signed myself up for doing this every March, it was totally worth it for the magic! I hope you try making one. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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