A Leaf Garland

I saw this project in a recent Oriental Trading magazine. I decided instead of ordering it, I could make it out of felt using left over sticky gems from Ella's birthday party. I figured it would take us (Ella and me) about 30 minutes... every single pre-school teacher reading this is on the floor laughing!

I used Swagbucks to find some leaf printables. I cut those out of paper and then traced them on to the felt. Then I had to cut THOSE out. At this point, with my very antsy 3 year old ready to eat glue, I realized my mistake: you must trace and cut the leaves BEFORE telling the toddler they are doing a craft. After Sesame Street (read: AN HOUR LATER), all the leaves had been cut out (and I opted to skip the orange piece of felt). Then it was lunch time.

After lunch (ANOTHER HOUR), we sat down with some glue, a toothpick and our gems. We carefully chose the gems and placed glue on to them using the toothpick (that was the best idea I had all day - no mess!) and glued them on to the leaves. In deciding how to hang our leaves, I decided to go with garland and used a tapestry needle to thread some orange cotton yarn through our adorned leaves.

It turned out way cuter (if not way sparser) than I had hoped. While it was time consuming, it was very easy and we both had fun. I'm thinking that we could pretty much do this for every single holiday out there (hearts, snowflakes, shamrocks, Easter eggs, etc).