Autumn is a magical time to enjoy craft activities! In this guest post Shelly and her son make some lovely autumn suncatchers to hang up in their home.
Making Autumn Suncatchers
By Shelly
My kids and I love autumn. When they were little ones we would always go walking in the wooded area near our home and kick the leaves on the ground, so autumn has always been seen as a fun season. There really is something magical about autumn and the leaves changing colours. The animals in our garden always seem busy – our local squirrels are always very active in autumn and it is normally the time of year that we spot our local hedgehog. And of course everyone knows Christmas is just around the corner. So as soon as I notice the first few signs of autumn I always want to do some sort of craft activity. This year the kids (well my son really) and I decided we would make some autumn suncatchers to hang up on our sliding door.
We always stick to a really easy method of making our suncatchers (one we have used over and over again).
1. Find a template or colouring page to trace over. For our autumn suncatchers we went with some autumn leaves and a few acorns. With this I think different leaves in different sizes looks really good. We used these templates:
We chose these autumn leaves and acorn templates and cut them out
2. We trace over the templates onto a laminating sleeve using our puffy paint. I must warn anyone who has not done this before that the puffy paint does smudge and you do need to let it dry before you do any of the other steps (we normally leave it overnight to dry). With our leaves we also drew a few extra lines inside the leaves, as we liked the idea of creating sections for different colours.
Outlining the templates with puffy paint
Some of our outlined templates
3. We colour in our images using felt tip pens. Not all felt tip pens work well for this but we have found that Sharpies are great.
Colouring in the suncatchers
More multi-coloured leaves
4. Once we have coloured in our images, we like to cut them out. You don’t have to cut them out - you could just hang up the laminating sleeves as they are.
Cut out leaves next to the original templates
Suncatchers cut out and ready to hang - these are on a white background to show them more clearly
5. Then we attach them to our sliding door or window using sticky-tack.
A close-up of our suncatchers on the glass door
Our full autumn suncatcher display!
This autumn craft is easy to do (and adapt for a range of ages) and it is very effective. And of course squeezing out the puffy paint is a great hand strengthening activity for younger kids. Why not give it a try?
There are more suncatcher craft ideas to explore here.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
