Meet the Elder Brothers

Yesterday we made "elder brothers" out of felt to go with our story, "The Elder Brother".

We gathered leaves on our walk earlier in the week, and used some of them as patterns.

I cut the leaves out ahead of time. I debated whether to have Lissie do some herself, but am glad I decided not to. She could have done it, but the felt was really fiddly to cut through and even with the leaves cut out, these took a long time to put together.

Lissie did the two on the left and Maxine did the two on the right (with plenty of assistance). Of course, I got stuck with the brown one! We did the thing where Lissie chooses a color, then Max, then Lissie, then Max, then Lissie complains the entire time about not getting the purple one. Or the orange one.

Lissie got a little creative on the last one and added an acorn "shoe" to his stem.

Assembling these was pretty straightforward, although we left off the wool roving because we made elder brothers and they don't need long hair I don't know where to buy it locally and the cheapskate in me resists ordering random, expensive supplies. I've been down that path before, and it never ends well.

I got the idea for these here from the blog Twig and Toadstool (no relation!). It looks like they are no longer updating the blog, but have left it up, which is great because they've got a bunch of cute craft ideas arranged by season.