Nature crafts.

On our last hike in the woods, we came home with lots of treasures. Pocket fulls, of milkweed pods, acorn caps and pine cones of all shapes and sizes. It is not at all unusual for us to bring home these types of treasures, in fact they can be found in baskets, on book selves and on display all over the house.
This time i gathered them with a purpose. i have seen some amazing nature crafts on different blogs and sites all over the web. i have been feeling especially creative lately, although i haven't been wanting to make items for sale...just wanting to craft to create and to share the experiences with the kids.
When i first started gathering the milkweed pods, it was for the precious seeds inside. We raise monarchs every year, and i would love to establish a nice patch of milkweed in our butterfly garden. Rather than always having to hike up the road to gather it.


However, once i got home and laid all our treasures out on the table i began seeing those milkweed pods in a whole new light. So i started looking up craft projects we could make with milkweed pods.

My first project was a very simple one. Milkweed pods make excellent doll cradles. :) This little baby is made with a wooden bead for a head, a bit of pipe cleaner as it's body and it is wrapped in wool roving. It was Sage idea to glue a bit of the milkweed fluff inside the pod so it would be nice and soft for the baby. i found the inspiration for our milkweed baby at this blog.

These sweet little milkweed mice are extremely easy to make. i found instructions for them here. The ears are two pine cone scales. The eyes are milkweed seeds, and the whiskers are pine needles. The tails are the stems from the milkweed. i used a bit of hot glue to put it all together. i placed the hot glue on the pod, and let my daughter glues the pieces on.

i found the directions for the owl on the same site as the mice. i have actually seen these on several blogs, so i'm not quite sure who the credit actually goes too. :) They really are quite fabulous.


For the owl, we used a small and medium size pine cone for the body and head. The wings are milkweed pods. i glued the milkweed pods to the body pine cone, and then attached the head on top of them. The eyes are acorn caps. The beak, ears and feet are all pine cone scales. The beak was cut just a little to give it a nice point. i find that hot glue works the best with these, because it dries almost instantly.

i have some ideas for a few of our own creations, i'll probably post this weekend.

A few other milkweed pod crafts i came across are Angels, and faeries. We'll try some of these later this week. :)