Autumn Critter Craft

Autumn can be a magical time of year for children to explore nature with the last of the harvests, the leaves going through a beautiful colour change and then falling along with their nuts and seeds. Our children love to go for long walks and collect many things including pine cones, conkers, teasels and beautiful leaves to use in Autumn crafting of one sort or another. This year they have decided to make some autumn critters with the things they have collected.

Many things that can be imagined by little ones can be easily made, start with the items you have managed to collect and see where your imagination takes you. As you can see we have made owls, hedgehogs and even conker man!

These are some of the things we started with, the little hedgehog seems like an obvious choice using the prickly teasel.

We have used the stalk as a nose and trimmed back some of the spikes at the stalk end until we had the desired length... this is quite prickly so little ones may need help or gloves. I found the teasel less prickly if you trim a tiny piece off the end of each spike, a bit like giving it a hair cut. Then all we did was add a nose and some googly eyes.

We love owls and the pine cone seemed to lend itself perfectly to the shape of an owl, so all we have done is add a few extra features to make it look a little more owl like. Conker man was made by my youngest daughter using a match stick and glue to hold his head on, she also gave him a lovely red super hero cape and has also been making him a family... so we now have a whole bunch of conker people.

 A few years ago we made nature faeries with our autumn collections if you would like to see I have added the link.

If you decide to collect some Autumn things on your nature walks let us know what you made. Have fun!

Spider webs for Halloween

 Halloween / Samhain is one of my favourite holidays, I love how spooky the house looks with broomsticks propped up by the front door and witches hats hanging on the hat pegs in the hallway. All cobwebs in the house get a reprieve for a few days and the smell of pumpkin lanterns wafts through every room.

    The children have been really busy crafting scary things for Halloween, we have had to find crafts suitable for a 2 year old to join in because she absolutely loves everything crafty the messier the better. Yesterday we made cobwebs with great, big hairy spiders in them. Do you think they look spooky or just rather cute?

    We have used conkers to hold the wooden skewers in place as we have many hanging around thanks to our Autumn collecting, but you could also use large crafting polystyrene balls, clay or indeed anything round you can find. Then the conker was covered in glue and rolled in wool that has been cut up very small so that it was all fuzzy. Pipe cleaner legs were added and googly eyes. The web part was very simple to make as you can see, it is easy to wind wool around the skewers. This does tend to slip a bit if played with too much, so some discrete dots of glue would hold this in place if you choose to.

 They are now ready to hang up on the wall to scare people for Halloween. My husband also helped our son to make a PVA glue cobweb. He drew out the web shape in glue on a laminate sheet and left it to dry overnight. Once dry it could be peeled off the laminate sheet, and stuck on a window. The thinner you can get the web the better here as it tends to spread out a little, but it looks very effective.