Wood Slice Wreath

We're on a roll here with these wood slice projects, this time a wreath. Again super simple and inexpensive.  

The wreath. For the base of the wreath have about 12-15 slices of wood roughly the same size.  My base slices were about 4 inches across so how many you need will depend on how large you want your wreath and how big they are.  Lay them out on the table in a circle arranged so that they have the most surface edge touching.  Hot glue the pieces where they touch and this is the base of the wreath.  By itself it will not be sturdy enough, this is where the smaller slices come in.  Lay them over the middle of two of the base layer slices and glue the heck out of them.  Do this all the way around and there is no way this wreath is coming apart.  Keep adding slices to add depth and dimension.  

The bow.  Making a perfect bow is difficult at best, especially if you are working with a stiff material like burlap.  For this reason I don't even try and no one will know the difference.  The bow on this wreath is made of four pieces.  Two for the loops and two for the streamers that hang down.  Hot glue is again your friend for making this look like it is the perfectly tied bow. The hot glue also insures that this bow isn't going anywhere.  Add an adornment and it's done.

The cost. Others of these I have seen made had a store bought base. I skipped that part for two reasons.  First, I would have to wait to make this until I had a chance to go into town and I'm not even sure where you buy such a thing so I would have to go looking around.  And second, it would add to an already heavy project.  Unless you know you are hanging this where there is a stud in your wall, over time it will make a large hole in dry wall.  Also it needs more than a picture frame nail to hang it up. The slices Dad cut for me from downed branches in the yard.  I have seen these slices in craft stores for an insane amount of money.  If you don't have a table saw to cut your own, do some networking in your neighborhood, someone must have some sort of saw that will cut these for you. Bring them some fresh baked cookies if they seem hesitant.  The pine cones I had in the craft closet that I picked one day when we were geocaching, so free.  The ribbon I got on clearance at Walmart.  It wasn't the right size so I had to cut it. Don't let the wrong size ribbon keep you from a good deal.  The ribbon was $1.50 and I used about a quarter of it making the final cost of the wreath 37 cents plus however much hot glue you use. 

  

  

We made a bunch of these for a church festival and added fake flowers and ribbon.  This made them a little more expensive, but not by much as we were able to use store coupons.  This one we added a couple painted wood pumpkins and a couple of spiders Dancer made.

Wood Slice Pumpkins

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We were cleaning and burning up some brush the other day to get the yard ready for fall. When Dad was cutting the wood up I said to cut me some slices of a branch to make pumpkins.  Super simple, paint the slice orange leaving a little margin on the edge, then glue a stick and some Spanish moss on the top with hot glue.  Done! I used a semi gloss paint from Walmart that was about $1.50. I made seven and used about half the bottle of paint making them about 10 cents apiece.   The moss I had saved from some dried arrangement so no cost there.  If I hadn't had the moss I would have used dried grass or a bit of green fabric for an embellishment.      

When the pumpkins were all lined up it made me think of the book I read to the kids at least a hundred times when they are little to teach ordinal numbers, "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting On a Gate."  Click  here to hear the song if you aren't familiar with it or just want to walk down memory lane.

Festival of the Voyager - Fur Trading Post

Helmets Required were on the road again, this time to learn about fur trading.  Here they are donning the fancy headwear of the time.  The fancy hats of the time were all made with felted animal fur from North America.  Any of the hats here would cost several years pay for an average person.  They are a good looking bunch!

We have been to a lot of pioneer exhibits but not fur trading so we learned a lot on our tour.  Here we are in an Indian winter house.  Brrr, the wind had to be just howling through the walls of these houses, I am surprised they all didn't catch their death of cold and not make it to the spring.  All we had to contend with that day was mosquitoes so thick we almost had to swim through them. 

Dinner was a tailing gating sandwich party.

Until the howling wind and driving rain arrived and then we moved it inside.  Of course as soon as we were done eating the deluge stopped.

We went back into the festival for the dance where lots of people we wearing costumes, including loin cloths!   The kids did some dancing, some of the dances were so fast thy were just a blur! It was a great evening watching them dance and wondering (and hoping!) if the loin cloth wearers had something on underneath.

Paul Bunyan Ice Cube

 

We are a long way from Texas but, we make our ice cubes Paul Bunyan sized!

Sculpture Park

Our last stop of the day was a sculpture park.  This place is the definition of cool and these are just a handful of the sculptures to look at and climb on and in.

 

 

A boom box tower.  In 30 years, how many IPod's will it take to make a sculpture this tall?

 

 

Helmet - appropriate for our Helmets Required boys.

 

 

She caught a big one!!

 

 

Making a deposit, or a withdrawal?

 

Leapin' Lizards

 

 

Hello, AAA, do you cover meltage?

 

 

Skin - this one reminded me of a wart.  The kids are playing on a wart. Yuck.

 

SHAZAM!!!

Wisconsin Wanderlust

 

Helmets Required took a field trip to ------- Wisconsin!!  That was uber exciting for Spark who had never been there.  I asked if he thought we needed a passport and that got him even more excited (yes, he knows Wisconsin is in the U.S.)  Before heading over the boarder we stopped for snacks which were enjoyed in this huge Adirondack chair. 

 

 

In Wisconsin we hiked and geocached in a state park. 

 

 

Their tummies called them to lunch at this great ice cream and pizza shop - which had their heads spinning?!



When we planned this field trip it included a boat ride on the river, however,

 

 

the government shut down put the kibosh our excursion.

 

 

We did enjoy hiking and climbing up, down, through, in and over basalt rocks.

 

 

 

Taking Out The Garbage

Dad cleaned out the shed this weekend and found a brittle, broken lawn chair, the ducks old kiddie pool and a little, green, Pooh Bear wheelbarrow (not in the picture) that Dancer use to be small enough to sit in.  How to get it to fit in the garbage can?

Mention to Spark that you need to smash up the items small enough to get them in the garbage can.  He will be on it in about two second flat.

All that is left and there are the handles to the wheelbarrow.  Plus, he raked it all up and shoveled it in the can without being asked. :)

4-H Meeting Around The Campfire

Back in September, when we were still wearing shorts and t-shirts, we started throwing around ideas for what to do at our future 4-H meetings.  An idea came up to have our November meeting outside by a campfire with sleeping bags and flash lights.  "Great idea!" we all said.  So it was all set, the November 12th meeting would be outside.  Well who knew we would wake to snow on the ground this morning and tonight it would be about 20 degrees with a very brisk wind.  In the spring we would think that these temps and conditions were nice but tonight it felt just a wee bit nippy.

 

This is all we saw on Dancer for almost the entire evening.  She did poke her nose out when she gave her report about the Jr. Leader meeting and did emerge completely from her self made cocoon to quickly play the game at the end.  I have to say though, except for some very cold toes, it was an awesome way to have a meeting.

Pumpkin Patch Field Trip

 

Pumpkins as far as you could see.  It looked like a field of basketballs.  This is a farm that grows pumpkins that are sold at stores out front in the big boxes.  In our area, if it says that the pumpkins are locally grown they came from these fields.  The pumpkins shown here are the left overs.  There was an early frost so some of them froze and I am not sure why the rest were passed over.

 

   

 

All the kids minus two.  The little girl that Dancer is holding is a baby that one of the families takes care of.  The highlight of Dancer's week is getting to play with her and she holds her every moment she gets.

 

 

Back to a member's house to carve all those pumpkins.

 

 

 

Checked out their llamas and alpacas.  I loved the expression the middle llama was giving Spark. 

 

 

They are quite large but on the plus side they only poo in one place, unlike a goat who goes where ever, and they don't smell.  Although they don't have any males that aren't gelded so they don't have those hormones flying around like we do with the goats.

 

The family cleaned 50 chickens this fall and then when everything was all put away they realized that they only cleaned 49.  The mom was saying how now they would have to haul everything back out and heat up boiling water to pluck and clean "a" chicken.  Dad told her about how we have had success with sticking the air compressor nozzle in the under the chicken skin and loosing it enough to easily peel the skin off.  "Let's do it!" she said right away.  Her son and Spark headed out to cut off the head and bleed it out with the air compressor humming away.  Dad stuck the nozzle under the skin and the bird blew up, that is why the legs are sticking up like that.  The air compressor was set on 120 pounds and we usually have ours set on 90 pounds for using the stapler or nailer.  We learned when the bird "popped" that 120 pounds is a bit too much pressure.

 

The kids finished cleaning the bird and dug out all the entrails to find all the parts since we had just done anatomy in our co-op last year. 

Her Nose Knows

 

Spark raked up a pile of leaves and thought it would be fun to play with Nikki in them.  Nikki didn't think so, in fact, she was scared of them.

 

 

We decided to reason with her stomach, because that is who you talk to when you want Nikki to do something.  We had a few tidbits of steak left over that Spark hid in the leaves for her to sniff out.

 

 

It took but one snack in the leaves for her to figure out that she was mistaken about not liking the leaves.   I was walking her around the yard and every time we would get to the corner of the shed she would take off to see if there was a new snack to be found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The best picture we could get with a dog that was sure there was one more snack in the pile.

 

Kacheekers stopped by to say he wasn't going to dig in the leaves for a snack, cats are above that sort of thing but, if we wanted to just give him a piece that would be fine.