Autumn is here. The time when we come home from every walk with our children laden with all sorts of natural things. Especially chestnuts, acorns, maple nosegays, pine cones and other odds and ends. In this short article I want to show you what you can create and craft with these autumn natural things. But first, head into the woods and bring your materials:
At home, prepare a hot melt gun (if you are going to buy one, choose a smaller one with a narrow longer tip – you can see what you are gluing better), transparent refills for the gun, a knife and scissors.
Acorn figures
If you have acorns, you can use them to make acorn elves, but I don’t want to write too much about them here, you should check out their gallery, or get their calendar or postcards to take home – you’ll find lots of inspiration for creating. And as you can see, you don’t have to make just simple figures, but you can play with them more – see for example the postcards with the devil, St. Nicholas and angel.
You can also glue some accessories, like a bicycle for acorn elves:
Or a motorcycle! But that’s kind of a higher level:
If you want to see how I glue such an acorn elf, watch this video – in 5 minutes the acorn elf can be glued together:
However, you don’t have to glue just acorn elves, there are plenty of other creatures that are based on acorns and are much simpler. For example, a little dog – you just need 2 big acorns for the head and body, 2 smaller ones for the eyes, the snout (which I already dropped in the photo) and the tail, 4 caps instead of legs (or sticks), depending on whether you want a dachshund or something taller, and two maple noses for the ears:
However, children have more imagination and so they can make various insects:
Board game figures
If you like to play board games, you can easily glue together your own characters from natural materials. You can then cut a playing cube from a wine cork and draw dots on it with a black marker (remember that the sum of the opposite sides of the correct cube is always 7). You can also download and print out the Acorn elf game.
Chestnut animals
Probably everyone has made a chestnut animal – either as a child or as an adult for their children. After all, these perfect products of nature are just asking for it. You can stick with the good old classic, where you do without glue and drill the individual components with a sharp knife or a nail and then join them together with skewers, or use the hot melt gun again – it’s much easier.
You can make a caterpillar out of chestnuts, for example:
Snowman (who knows if there will be snow this year):
The creepy cross-eyed spider. They even gave it a nice name on Facebook: Chestnut Spider:
Slightly higher level is the dragonfly
Or a dwarf:
The Acorn elves also have a new friend – a chestnut who likes to play football:
However, be aware that chestnuts are much more likely to fall apart than acorn ones – this is due to the fact that chestnuts are smoother, shrink more and are heavier. But then again, they are beautiful. So I recommend taking a picture right after making them!
And what to craft from pine cones and other materials?
You can make a nice mouse out of pine cones
Or a slide for acorn elves:
Inspiration on paper
This year I made some more critters, took pictures of them and created a critter memory game. Fans on social media helped me come up with original names for the critters. So when you’re getting ready to create characters and other critters at home from autumn’s natural materials, get the critter memory game, which includes dozens of characters for inspiration:
Share your creations
If you create something nice, don’t be afraid to show it off – either on the Facebook acorn elves pages or in a group dedicated to their creation. I’ll be continuously enriching this article with more creations I make with my kids.
And if you can’t find any natural materials or don’t want to burn yourself with a melt gun, you can assemble figures from Dubnets:
