Crafty Mommy Workshop - Autumn

After a lot of thinking and preparation I managed to hold my very first Crafty Mommy Workshop with Autumn crafts and activities.

Quite a few moms have asked me about the activities we've been doing with E. since she was small, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a craft session for mommies (instead of telling everyone separately).

The workshop was in Hungarian as English-speaking moms didn't sign up 😞. The main idea was that moms could learn some easy to make activities and at home they can work them out with their kids.

I collected autumn activities around 5 major topics:

• Conkers
• Leaves and trees
• Halloween
• St. Martin's Day (Márton nap)
• Thanksgiving

I dedicated 1 hour to go through the activities, however, they proved to be too many as we couldn't cover the last 2 topics. Still, I hope the 2 moms who turned up (other 2 cancelled 😞) will benefit from what they heard at the workshop. 

The original ideas of these activities are either from other blogger moms or mine. I mainly came up with  the conker games but here I'd also like to pay tribute to the pages I read and "steal" ideas from:

Leaves and tree activities:

1. Paint and stamp with the leaves
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Paint around the leaf
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Laminated leaf rubbing (or just place leaves under a white sheet of paper and rub it with autumn colour crayons)
   
   
   
   
4. Leaf lacing
   Although I didn't print the free printable leaves, just used our laminated leave that I'd punched on the sides. Shoelaces are pretty goof for threading, but if your child has any difficulties with the small ending you can add some cell tape to make the end firmer.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Make leaf faces and  people out of (laminated) leaves
   
   
   
   
6. Leaf shred pictures autumn images and animals too
7. Count the leaves with free printable
8. Stamping leaves on a tree with toilet paper roll
9. Popsicle stick tree 
10. Make a hedgehog/squirrel with leaves
    
    
    

What else to do with leaves:

• collect them
• group them by their size, colour
• make them stand in a line from the biggest to the smallest
• paint them, colour them, trace them
• press them
• make a crown out of fresh autumn leaves

The participants got a nice pack of goodies to work with at home, like 10 laminated leaves, a punched leaf with a shoelace for the lacing, some magnets so they can stick the leaf faces/people on the fridge, popsicle sticks, squirrel/hedgehog templates and the counting leaves free printable.

The third topic we could cover was Halloween. Here are the crafts I showed to the moms:

1. Cotton ball ghost
2. Baby food jar mummies (I'll soon write a post on this in detail)
   
   
   
3. Jack-o-lantern faces with shapes
4. Pumpkin emotions
5. Toilet paper spiders, monsters with googly eyes 
6. Skeleton out of cotton buds
   
   
   

In the mommy package there were some toilet paper tubes, googly eyes, black pipe cleaners, cotton balls, baby food jar, a roll of gauze, black cardboard, orange construction paper and, of course, two printables: the black shapes for making Jack-o-lantern faces and the pumpkin faces showing different emotions.

The other topics were postponed and due to the lack of time we agreed to have a similar session with winter and Christmas activities. We had a wonderful time together and I've been planning our next session excitedly.