Apple-Print Thank You Cards

My goodness, this last month (two months really) has been extremely busy. We have had birthday parties, hosted Arthur’s birthday, baby showers, bachelorette parties, and hosted my sister’s bridal shower. Those were just some of the events occupying our weekends. In the coming weeks I hope to write a bit about them, but we’ll see! Additionally, we have still been up to our usual crafts, cooking, and numerous seasonal walks over at the New Canaan Nature Center. The last walk involved lots of leaf catching, frog spotting, fishing with sticks, and muck moving. Arthur had a fabulous time trying to make a stream in the mud at the edge of one of the ponds. If I find time before the first snow, I will try to post some of those pictures.  You can check out some of our other seasonal NCNC walks here and here.

Anyway, on to the post! Arthur had a great 4th birthday party. The weather held out, so we were lucky to be able to go forth with our planned outside activities. We painted bug rocks and searched for them, made spider webs, made pumpkin bean mosaics, and had just a merry time running around. I hope to write more about the details soon. However, here are the thank you cards Arthur, and George, made for his friends.

Supplies:

• apple cut vertically
• paint and brushes ( I used red and yellow paint to get some color mixing lessons in there too)
• construction paper
• Children’s water color paper (or any slightly thicker paper)
• colored pencils
• glue stick

I cut the apple vertically and had the paint ready to go. I also had the children’s water color paper already cut to size so there would be easy swap outs for a constant stream of apple printing. After I gave the boys a quick demonstration and we checked out the seeds of the apples, they were off and had a blast!

The first steps were to paint the apples and stamp them on the thicker water color paper. They had a fun time deciding which apples to paint red, yellow and how to make orange ones.

Make sure to have them really press down on the apple to get a good stamp and outline.

Repaint and stamp as many as you can!

Once you are all done stamping, let the prints dry. Then, cut the construction paper to the size you would like for your cards.

When the apple prints were dry, I trimmed the paper a bit and then glued them onto the construction paper. Finally, if the kids have not had enough of the project, you can have them draw stems onto the apples. Arthur only wanted to do that on some…so I didn’t push!

They were fun to make and I think they turned out pretty well. I even got a quick lesson on mixing colors in there! Do you have any fun hand made thank you card ideas? If so, please share!