I am soooooo excited about how our Fall Tree Craft turned out this year. Who knew some odd and end puzzle pieces could make such a work of art!


We started by making our tree trunk and branches out of a brown paper sack. After cutting strips off the paper bag (larger one for the trunk, smaller ones for the branches) scrunch them up and glue them onto a blue piece of paper.


For the leaves we used a collection of puzzle pieces we had from our game cupboard from puzzles that were missing too many pieces to keep anymore. We used smaller puzzle pieces like the 100 piece ones from the dollar store. If you don't have any to spare at home, just go buy a $1 puzzle from the Dollar Tree.


To get the cool marbled effect on the puzzle pieces I put a squirt of red, yellow and orange acrylic paint next to each other on a plate. (I wish I would have got a picture of this part, sorry!) Then with the end of our paintbrush, we swirled the colors together until they looked marbled. Then we dabbed our paintbrush into the paint and dabbed it onto the white side of the puzzle piece. If you don't dab the paint onto the puzzle pieces it won't transfer the marble effect onto the puzzle pieces. If you brush the pieces, the colors will just blend into one color. Hope this makes sense.

While our puzzle pieces were drying, we used a fork and green paint to make grass on the bottom of our paper. Once the puzzle pieces were dry, we used lots of school glue to put them all over our tree. 
We overlapped some of the puzzle pieces to give it more dimension.


 I LOVE THIS TREE!! Luke said to me today that it really looks like leaves are going to fall off the tree. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably have just started with a white sheet of paper and had the boys paint the background blue with watercolors to give it even more dimension.

It seems a bit early to be doing Fall crafts since none of the leaves around here are changing colors yet, but I don't care. It just gives us something to look forward to over the next month. In anticipation for Autumn to come, we picked up these two books at the library.
A fun book about all the changes that Fall brings. I love this book not only because of it's simplicity, but because it seriously talks about all the reasons why Fall is my FAVORITE season! It makes me so giddy just thinking about all the fun this season brings.
This book talks about what Fall brings as well, except the little boy in the story gets it all mixed up; i.e., "Apples turn orange, pumpkins turn red, Leaves float up into blue skies overhead." It is fun to read to the kids for them to laugh about the mishaps in the book. After reading it, you go back through and find all the mistakes.

Happy Crafting!!

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