Make Your Own Flower Crown

I am a happy subscriber to Family Fun Magazine, but sometimes I find the activities either too expensive or time-consuming for our family. But I'm challenging myself to find at least one activity out of each issue that is neither expensive, nor too tedious to put together. I plan on doing the activity and blogging about it with step-by-step pictures. Avlyn and I started today with the wildflower crown from August's issue. You can join in this challenge by leaving a comment about any fun project you do that doesn't cost a lot or require a whole day to put together. It doesn't have to be a Family Fun idea.

Cost: none
Time needed: Approximately 1-hour total, but we picked the flowers in the morning and created the crown in the evening.

Steps:

1. Take a walk and find some sturdy, long-stemmed wildflowers. I'd love to be able to tell you the names of what we used, but I have no idea. We used a couple types of grasses that had fuzzy stuff on the end and then some flowers we found growing along the edge of the national forest we live next to. The grasses have the sturdiest stems, so I used them to get the crown started. After washing them to get rid of bugs, this is what we had:



2. We let the flowers dry while we ran errands. The crown only takes about 10 minutes to put together. Starting with a sturdy long-stemmed flower or grass, hold the stem horizontal. Using another piece, loop it around the first stem and tie a knot. Lay the flower or grass flat and repeat. If you can't tie a knot, just loop the second stem around itself like this:



3. Now repeat the process, holding the stems together while you loop and knot. Once the crown is long enough for your child's head, feel free to go back and loop some smaller stemmed flowers into the crown. That's what we did with some small white flowers Avlyn wanted to add. Tie all the stems together with a loose knot to close. When we were done it looked like this:



While I think this is a great craft to do for together time and helps kids learn the basics of weaving, you could use it for a nature unit or flower unit, too. I have three other projects we're going to try from this same issue. I'm excited to try them and share them with you. Happy homeschooling!