THIS IS A GUEST POST FROM ONE OF MY VERY FAVOURITE BLOGGERS: ALEXIS FROM SOMETHING I MADE. HOPE YOU LOVE HER AS MUCH AS I DO!
When Hattie challenged me to make a present for free, my mind started buzzing with ideas… but none of them were totally free.
But then conker season came upon us and suddenly I was finding conkers everywhere, hidden in pockets and bags, stuffed into secret corners. My children, like squirrels were hoarding them…. and suddenly making a very free present became easy.
Henry quite often likes doing a bit of ‘beading’ as he calls it, stringing chunky beads onto an old shoe lace, he knows how to live that boy… and here were loads of free beads just waiting to be made.
I’ve jazzed up the beads a bit and made them a little felt bag from some offcuts I already had. Then I also made a game for free from the fantastic Mr Printables website and put them together in a ‘nature box’ (read shoebox covered in paper which I also found and downloaded for free). So all pretty cost free if you don’t count printing costs, which I don’t as I got my Mum to print them out on her super duper work printer (so cheeky, but thanks Mum).
So here you go – a free present, kind of aimed at a three year old, but then it all depends on how you decorate your conkers I think.
I probably went a bit overboard covering a shoe box – but I’m a sucker for a nicely covered box, it’s just one of those things. I keep boxes just for this type of occasion (it drives my husband mad).
For the bag I used some offcuts of felt I had hanging around to make a really simple draw string back – felt is great as it doesn’t need proper seam finishing etc so this could be hand sewn really easily. If you don’t have felt you could use and old t-shirt… or just put the conkers in a nice paper bag. I used the other shoe lace for the draw string and attached a conker to each end.
The leaf matching game is downloadable from Mr Printables here:
http://www.mrprintables.com/printable-memory-game-autumn-leaves.html
We have played this with Coco and Henry and they both really loved it. So simple, but that’s part of the joy. You could of course easily collect and scan in leaves to create this game yourself.
I found the free wrapping paper printable here:
http://meinlilapark.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/free-digital-and-printable-forest.html
So there you have it, our autumn nature box, with leaf matching and conker beading. Ready to be played with and to store all sorts of other foraged finds in.