Handy Holiday Wreath

We have been going crazy with the projects around here, so I will try to update on what we have done. With the kids home from school for many many days over the Thanksgiving holiday (2 more days to go!) we have been keeping ourselves busy with lots of projects and lots of Christmas decorating.

This Hand Wreath is a super easy project that we put together in just a few minutes one night after dinner.

The base of the wreath is a paper plate with the center cut out (like a donut). I actually piled two plates together to make it a little sturdier and then glued them together.

The red hands are Tater's and the green ones are Sprout's. You could do any color combination that works for the holiday at "hand" (ha!). Blue and white for Hannukah, or black, yellow and red for Kwanzaa. Were there official colors of Festivus?

We used full-sized construction paper, with three sheets stacked up and folded in quarters to make 12 of each handprint with only one round of tracing and cutting. If you wanted to kill more time you could make a pattern and trace and cut each handprint separately. I was all about efficiency - but we didn't have a lot of time!

Once the hands are all cut out, space them out around the paper donut to make sure you can cover the whole thing. We did it with the curved side of the plate-donut up so the fingers are sort of fluffed out. Once you have the hands arranged how you like, stick them down to the plate with a glue stick or good old Elmer's.

Once it is dry, you could add more decorations - stickers, cut outs, a bow. Whatever you'd like to jazz things up. We went for the purist version.

I am considering doing something similar to this as a class gift for Sprout's teacher. I was thinking that if we cut the hands out of felt and hot glued them together it could be a more permanent keepsake. If I can just get a traced hand from each kid in the class, I think that it could be very cool. Maybe with the kids names on each hand...I am still formulating a plan.

Hope you enjoy this project or whatever you decide to do with those kids on these days off. December is FULL of days off for us. I need to make a list of projects to fill all of those days!