Seven Autumn Nature Crafts for Children
In summer, we wrote about seven garden crafts that cost nothing, Summer Nature Crafts. The autumn version is even simpler. The materials walk home in pockets. Seven small projects, in roughly the order the season offers them, that need no shopping list and no instructions a child cannot follow.
1. Conker animals
The simplest craft of October. A handful of conkers, a few matchsticks or short twigs, and a small drill held by an adult to make the joining holes. Children invent the animal. The result is always a small parliament of bewildered creatures arranged on the nature table, where they belong. Younger children who cannot manage the twigs can sort and polish the conkers instead, which keeps them busy as long as the drilling does.
2. Leaf garlands
Pick leaves while they are still soft and pliable, not after they have curled. Thread them onto cotton string with a blunt darning needle, leaf by leaf, the long way through the stem. Hang in a window. The colours hold for two weeks, then deepen as they dry. Maple and aspen thread best; oak is too stiff and tears at the needle.
3. Pressed leaves
The slowest craft of all and the most rewarding. Place leaves between two sheets of paper inside the heaviest book in the house. Forget about them for a week. Each pressed leaf comes out flat, dry, and ready for the inside cover of a Christmas card.
4. Twig stars
Five straight twigs of roughly equal length, lashed together with natural twine into a five-pointed star. Hung in a window from October onwards. The stars will weather, fade, and eventually fall apart by spring. That is correct. A child who finds the lashing fiddly can make a simpler triangle from three twigs, which holds together with far less winding.
5. Pine cone hangings
Tie a length of twine to the top of a pine cone and hang it in a window or from a low branch outside. Smear with vegetable fat and roll in seeds for the birds. A craft that turns into a quiet daily watch from the kitchen window.
6. Rowan beads
Pick rowan berries fresh and thread them onto strong cotton with a needle. The berries shrink as they dry, tightening the string into a deep red necklace or wreath. Best made in the last week of September, finished by mid-October. Keep them well away from the under-threes, for whom a strung berry is a temptation rather than a decoration.
7. Bark boats, for autumn puddles
The summer craft, repurposed Summer Nature Crafts. A piece of pine bark for the hull, a twig for the mast, a yellow birch leaf for the sail. The puddles are bigger now. The voyages are longer. The kaarnavene (the Finnish bark boat) crosses an October puddle like a small ship.
The thread through all of them
Nothing needs to last. The conker animals will be lost behind the radiator by November. The garland will brown. The bark boat will sink. This is the lesson the season itself teaches: things made from the forest return to the forest, and there will be more next year. A child who learns this in October learns it for life.
Read more on the Nordic Autumn hub, or see ten slow autumn invitations for children Ten Slow Autumn Activities.
The current Seasonal PlayBook is a companion for exactly this point in the year. View →
