Festival of Trees Wreaths

I helped both of the girls' classes create wreaths this year.  Kyleigh's class had a "mining in Idaho" theme and Katelyn's class did a Renaissance theme.  I had the kids in Kyleigh's class paint pick and ax sets that I had cut out of wood with silver paint.  I also had them cut small foam blocks into gem like shapes (gems are all shapes so they could pretty much do whatever they wanted).  Then we used hot glue to put colored rock salt on the foam gems.  I made a sign for the middle of the wreath that said, "Idaho gems by Idaho's gems."  We got an honorable mention at the festival of trees for that wreath.  With Katelyn's class I cut rectangles out of leather and burned the edges of the leather so it would look aged.  We cut out small pieces of paper and put holes through the paper and leather.  The kids bound the paper and leather together to make tiny little books.  Their teacher had them write stories in their tiny little Renaissance books for the wreath.  I also cut out swords from wood and had each of the kids spray paint a sword.  Their teacher also printed out whole page shrinky dinks and had the kids color them.  She then shrunk them down to ornament size for the wreath and added a bunch of other little things.  Both of the wreaths turned out so well and were purchased by the parents of class members, which is really cool.