Easy Spring Craft: Forsythia Branch

While looking for a photo of my son from last spring, I bumped into this shot that I took of my Forsythia bush while sitting on the front porch swing with the kids last spring.

My heart ached a little. I love winter. I really mean that. I love it! I love the snow, I love playing in the snow, and I love being warm and cozy inside. I love winter meals and winter desserts. I love not sweating when I make supper. However. It's been really cold for a really long time this winter, too cold to take the little ones out to play too much  because there's been an almost constant wind chill warning of -25 degrees. That's frostbite territory. So, we get all bundled up, go outside for 10 minutes, and then head back inside. I long for the smell of wet, thawing earth, for the sounds of water dripping and running through the neighbourhood, for the sights of new life bursting from trees, bushes, lawns, gardens.

So this morning, we decided to make spring come a little early in our house with this easy Forsythia craft.
What you need: Heavy stock white paper (like scrapbook paper), small branches or twigs, squares of yellow tissue paper, glue

I went outside and snapped a very dead branch off of our unhealthy Maple tree in the back yard, and took out some unused but not forgotten white scrapbooking paper. (C'mmon, you know you've got some in that drawer of scrapbooking stuff that you'll likely never use again for its intended purpose. Pull it out for this craft.) Scrapbooking paper works well for this, because it's a little heavier than regular paper, and once you cut it in half, you've got a nice tall, narrow paper.

I snapped some smaller branches off of the main branch, and glued them down. If you've got older kids making this craft, you can let them arrange and glue the branches. I did this craft with a 2 & 3 year old, so I took on that part. You can either wait for the glue to dry, or get out your hairdryer and help the process along - you want the glue to be pretty dry before you start the craft, because the branch will come loose from wet glue pretty easily.

If you're doing this craft with really young ones, you can do what I did - which was to put drops of glue alongside the branch, then your child can crumple a square of yellow tissue, and place it in the glue. If you have older kids doing the craft, you can put some glue in a dish and the kids can dip the crumpled tissue paper into the glue and then place it along side the branch.

That's pretty much all there is to it! Hang it on the wall, and enjoy the bright colours and reminder that spring is on it's way!