Virtual Refrigerator - Wreath and Retablo for the Holidays

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Welcome to another edition of the Virtual Refrigerator! Thank you for joining me and my co-hosts for our weekly art link-up. We all cordially invite you to add your link sharing artwork that's on your Virtual Refrigerator and then hop over to the other blogs and admire what's on their Fridges too!

For my fridge this week, I've pulled out a couple of projects from the archives to share with you, and this post will be included in a Homeschool Review Crew round-up of Hands On for the Holidays ideas for crafts, recipes, activities, and more.

For as long as I've been with our homeschool fellowship group, we've had a Christmas Craft Breakfast during the first week of December, and it's a great opportunity for the kids to make gifts and holiday decorating items together. The past couple of years, I have been helping kids make fleece wreaths, and they are really easy to do.



Start with a bargain fleece blanket at WalMart (under $3) and cut it into strips about 1-1/2 inches by 6 inches. Prepare a wire hanger as the frame by bending it into a circle shape. Tie the fleece strips onto the hanger (just simple knots) and push them together to make it full. We used around 100 strips for this one. Once the hanger is completely covered with the fleece strips, bend the hook part into a circle so it's a built-in hanging loop for the wreath. If you'd like, you can cover the hook with ribbon or yarn that matches the fleece to make it more finished-looking. Add a decorative bow (ours was from the dollar store) and you are done!

Depending on the age of the child, the wreaths take about 10-15 minutes to put together, once you have the wire frames shaped and the strips cut out of the fleece.





See the original post with this craft idea: Virtual Refrigerator - Fleece Wreaths

Now if you have more time, and would like to do a little bit of geography and world culture study along with your Christmas craft, here's another idea from a past Virtual Fridge - a retablo.

Retablo is a traditional folk art in the country of Peru. It's rather like a shadowbox or a diorama - a box filled with figures of people arranged to tell a story. Priests used to carry brightly colored retablos filled with religious scenes through the mountain roads for people to see, and to use as teaching tools. Nowadays retablos are not limited to religious scenes but might tell a story from myth or legend. I have a miniature retablo from Peru, and it served as a bit of inspiration when Kennady put together her own a few years ago.

  

Our instructions for making a retablo come from the book Geography Through Art. To make it, Kennady cut the lid of an empty shoebox in half the long way, then taped the sides of it back onto the box, so that they would open out like doors. Then she made figures out of Sculpey clay to represent a nativity scene.

Once she'd planned how the figures would be arranged inside the box, she painted a background scene using acrylic paints.

We made the back of the stable using wooden craft sticks. The craft sticks, and then the figures were hot glued into the box, and then Kennady also painted and decorated the insides of the doors to the box. The outside of the box can be painted and decorated as well, but we never got around to that.

(Visit the page Peruvian Retablos at wikipedia to see pictures of Andean retablos.)
See the original post with this craft idea: Virtual Refrigerator: Retablo Art.

Now it's your turn! Join us by sharing your art posts here on the Virtual Fridge!

Grab a virtual magnet and add your link here to share your child's art or your arts and crafts how-to posts. Please visit the other blogs and admire what's on their Virtual Refrigerators!

An InLinkz Link-up

Visit the Homeschool Review Crew blog to get more great ideas for the holidays, as Crew members share in the Hands On for the Holidays Round-up, which will be live on Friday, November 11th.

This post is part of a Coffee & Conversation Link Party at PatAndCandy.com - Join us! - and is also linked at the Hearts for Home Blog Hop hosted by Embracing Destiny and nine other blogs.

 

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