Leaf Crown How To - Red Ted Art

Hello again, welcome back to kids crafty and our leaf crowns this week… now… ever since working on the “Get Crafty with Nature” ebook, we have been wanting to make some leaf crowns – Leaf Crafts are fantastic for this time of year. Red Ted loves collecting leaves and autumn has such beautiful colours, that this really is the best time of year. This is a wonderful Autumn Craft for Kids idea and can be made whilst out an about in the woods or parks this autumn! If your kids are a little young – make them FOR YOUR kids. If they are older, they should be able to manage themselves. We do have a fantastic list of Autunn Crafts for Preschoolers for you to check out too!

The Book

Babar Looses his Crown, by Laurent de Brunhoff.

If you are not familiar with the Babar series of books you really should give them a go. I think I may be a little nostalgic here, as I clearly remember them from when I was a little girl. We now have a couple of the Babar books – and the children are enthralled by them. There is usually an adventure and lots to learn. In this particular book, Babar goes to Paris with his family, when, oh no, his suitcase is accidentally switched with that of a “moustached man”… and his suitcase contains his crown. Babar is quite distressed at his grand opera visit that evening without a crown. So on the hunt they go all around Paris – a great little way to see the Parisienne landmarks.

The very first Babar book has quite text heavy so we often skim it a little as the children want to look at the next pictures. This one however is a shorter one with only 1-2 sentence per page. Great for small people’s concentration spans.As a cautionary note: the very fist book features Babar’s mother being shot and an old King eating poisonous mushrooms – explain that to a 3yrs old! None of that in this book.. and yet both books are much enjoyed by the children.

So.. should Babar’s crown not be found (of course it is)… next time he can make one:

Leaf Crown How To for Kids

We have a choice of video and step by step photos once again….

How To Make a Leaf Crown Video:

How to Make a Leaf Crown Step by Step Photos

Pip Squeak adores getting dressed up and loves wearing all sorts of crazy outfits. So I thought this would be perfect for her. Sadly not. She ran a temperature that day and the minute I placed the crown or her weary head started crying. Poor little thing. Hopefully we will be making more of these in the coming weeks and years. And maybe Red Ted will want to try and make one himself soon!

Which means you will have to be happy of a photo with teddy wearing it! (It looked SO cute on Pip Squeak… much nicer than on teddy *sigh*).

1) We used around 12-15 leaves, as our leaves were narrower (the width of an adult hand? But if you use those large beautiful maple or oak leaves or similar, you may only need 7-8?). And try and find leaves with a reasonable amount of “stem”. The first thing you need to do is remove the stem. I removed the stem one at time, so as not to loose them in the windy Autumn weather.

2) Take the the leaves and fold about 1/4 to a 1/3 “up” and the place them inside each other. Our crown ended up very big – a bit more like an Indian headdress.. so fold it the leaves more if you want to make the crown smaller. Take one of the stems and “sew” the two pieces together (it is enough to literally just loop the stem in once. You can just about see the “stitch” in the second picture above. Take your next leaf and remove the stem. Fold over and attach…