Craft Night

So I have been given the task of coming up with a Christmas craft for our home school group. The group ranges from K4-7th grades so coming up with an activity for every one is somewhat challenging. I have been blog hopping and have come across a few good ideas. There are so many GREAT blogs that focus on crafts that it’s mind boggling! Anyway, I saw these cute felted wool ornaments and figured that most kids would be able to make them. I have learned that I need to test the projects first, so I headed to Joann Fabric’s to pick up some wool roving. Today I had all the kids try their hand at making them. This is the first time I have worked with wool roving so I am learning as I go.

The process is fairly easy, you just pull off small bunches of the roving and stuff into cookie cutters. Once the cookie cutter is full, drop a small amount of soap onto the roving and wet with warm/hot water.

Use fingers or other utensil to poke the roving until it is all matted - this takes a couple minutes.

When the roving is all matted, rinse with hot water, then rinse with cold water. Pat with towel to get out excess water and allow to dry. When the ornament is dry, embellish however you wish.

One thing I have learned, the wool roving from Joann Fabric’s doesn’t seem to wet felt very well. After looking at all the wool on Etsy, I am thinking that buying there is the way to go. I can’t wait to get my hands of some good Merino wool and see how that works.

For the last 3 weeks, M2 has been reviewing colors in school. On Tuesday, he was supposed to paint a coffee filter and make a butterfly, but I put it off due to the fact of MESS and various other reasons. Tonight seemed like a good night, so we go out the water colors and aprons. All of them wanted to try their hand at it so now we have 4 water colored coffee filters ready to be made into butterflies. The girls are very colorful, and the boys, well, I guess they like camo colored butterflies.