I have been wanting to start having the boys help me make decorations for the house for the different seasons. I think it would be so fun to pull out the decorations we have made in the house and then make new ones to add to the collection. In just a few years we could have a house full of reminders of fun memories!!
We are hosting a dinner for our Sunday School class on Saturday night at our house so I decided to go ahead and make some fall decorations for the house and start this tradition! We are going to try to make at least one decoration every day this week if we can!
Tonight we made a wreath and mantle garland. I will admit both ended up being advanced for my 4 year old and 2 year old but I did my best to get them to help where I could and it must have worked because they feel proud and really feel like they helped!
The wreath started off to be like a wreath that I found online somewhere (can’t remember where) where they took a wire coat hanger and made it into a circle and then put slits in toilet paper rolls and slid them on and then glued leaves all over it. You turn around the hook of the hanger so that it can work as a hook for your wreath.
Well I got the wreath prepped with all of that (I got it in the best circle that I could…it is hardly a perfect circle though) and pulled out my box of fake fall leaves that I had. Well I had in there some decoration sticks that had apples or pumpkins or pine cones with flowers and leaves (don’t know what you call them) and thought they would be pretty. But of course they were too heavy to glue on the toilet paper rolls…so I ended up attaching them straight to the wire coat hanger with pipe cleaners (had to work with what I had – HA!). We then glued the leaves on the toilet paper rolls in between them. I can’t believe that we actually got it to work in the end.
I had Seth pull leaves from their plastic stems and then Aaron would hand them to me and point to where he thought I should put it. I glued them because I used hot glue so they would stick better.
Here is the end result.
The other decoration we did was a mantle garland! I actually saw this idea on the Rachel Ray show today (this is my show that I tape and then relax and enjoy while the kids are napping :-)).
On the show they took a ribbon and some decorative paper clips and silk leaves (they gave the idea of using real leaves for it to). All they did was paper clip the leaves to the ribbon and then hang the ribbon on the mantle. It was super easy and super cute!!
Well I don’t have any of those fancy paper clips and doubt my wal-mart in my little town would carry them, but I figured – hey why couldn’t we just staple them on!!
I gave Seth some leaves and Aaron some flowers and I had them alternate giving me leaves and flowers for me to staple on the ribbon (it actually was a good little lesson in patterns…we may try this again for Christmas garland and maybe find something that would be more than two objects to do a little bit more difficult patterning exercise!).
Here is our garland! I LOVED how this turned out!
Tomorrow we are planning on doing some stained glass leaves. We don’t have good leaves around our house because we have mostly mesquite leaves but we are going to library tomorrow morning and the library yard has some HUGE beautiful leaves! We are going to make a point to pack a bag so we can pick up some leaves!!
I am really excited about this new tradition…I hope and pray I keep up with it because it really could be a treasure a few years down the road!!
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