apples

It’s September 1st!  How did that happen?!?  Just a few short days until school starts, and I’ll have to decide whether to continue doing themed projects during the school year – I have two enthusiastic votes for “yes”, but I’m not sure, realistically, how much time we’ll have once the big girl is in school all day…

Today’s project was inspired by a couple of different ideas I found on the internet…which I didn’t bookmark.  :(

First, I cut strips of red and green cardstock, about 1/2″ x 4 1/4″.  Then we curled those strips around a pencil to create little curls of paper.  (Carolyn was very good at this part, Anna was more interested in uncurling the curls.)

Then we drew tree trunks on brown construction paper – Carolyn drew her own and I drew one for Anna – then cut them out and glued them onto a light blue background.

Finally, we glued the curls of paper onto the trees to make leaves and apples.  I think the original project ideas I found had you gluing the edges to the paper, but both girls preferred the look of the curls glued on their sides.

Of course, this way they don’t stay especially well-curled, but they’re cute anyway!

We glued some green strips to the bottom of the paper for grass, and I have no idea where they were going with the little yellow bits they cut out…?

I found a slightly-expired jar of applesauce while I was cleaning out my pantry last weekend.  And then I found a recipe for Apple Cinnamon Dough (scroll down on that page).

The kids had fun helping me measure and mix – there was a cloud of cinnamon floating about our heads the entire time.  The kitchen might never smell normal again!

We rolled it out and cut it with apple cookie cutters…and other fall shapes.

The instructions said to leave them someplace to dry for days.  We’re not that patient, so I set the oven to 200F and put the ornaments on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets.  After 10 minutes, I flipped them over and baked them for another 10 minutes.

They aren’t quite completely dried out, but they’re pretty close!  And they smell wonderful.  We might paint or otherwise decorate these later this week, but with a pretty ribbon strung through the holes they’d also be lovely and sweet smelling just as they are.

This week, in order to get us in the back-to-school spirit for next week, the theme is “apples”!

There are lots of fun projects to do with actual real edible apples, but it was too windy to go apple picking yesterday (we were worried we might wind up with apples falling on our heads, and we already know about gravity, thank you very much.)  So, since the current apple population in the house is rather dismal, we did a paper-y craft project instead today.  (We used the template, and loosely followed some of the directions, from this site.)

First we taped our template to the back of a piece of wax paper, then taped that down to the table.

I had the girls squirt glue all around the inside of the apple shape, then brush the glue around to fill it all in, going over the edges a bit.

Then they tore up bits of red tissue paper and pressed them into the glue all around the apple.  A few pieces of green for the leaf, and a bit of gold for the stem completed the tissue paper piecing.

When they were finished with the tissue paper, I cut out the apple from the template paper, and traced it – right side facing down – on a couple of pieces of black construction paper.

The girls had wandered off to play by this point, so I finished cutting the traced apple out of the middle of the paper, then called them back to glue the frames on their apples.

They look really pretty taped to a window!