A Floral Pumpkin Centerpiece

Following on from Saturday's MAKEbreak Fall Door Decor, today Michaels Stores are holding a class to make a Floral Pumpkin that can be used as a seasonal accent or centerpiece. The class is free; you just buy the pumpkin. The actual decorating supplies will differ from store to store, so if you want to use something other than the flowers and fillers your local Michaels store provides, you may need to purchase those yourself.

ICYMI

The project guide for last month's Fall Floral Welcome Plaque is now available on Michaels' website. Note that some of the stems and fillers are seasonal and may have sold through. Take the instructions as a general guide and choose flowers and fillers of similar size and shape, and a colorway of your choosing.

The instructions for the samples on yesterday's Fall Door Decor registration page can be found here, here, and (for kids) here.

My Demonstration Pumpkin

Build a Fall Wreath

Today, Michaels Arts and Crafts Stores had a "MAKEBreak" event from 1 to 3pm.

If you haven't heard of MAKEBreak, I think the older label, "Make It — Take It" describes it much better... While MAKEBreak is meant to be read as "take a break and make something", I read it more as "make something and break it". (How many of your childhood crafts got home from school the way they looked at the end of the class?) That said, one of the biggest virtues of the Maker movement is the freedom to break the "rules" and put existing components together in new and different ways to create useful systems and devices.

(Personal prejudice here: I dislike the co-option of the "Maker Movement" by craft stores, sewing stores, and art stores; the original idea was to use electronics and circuitry to create novel useful items, to solve problems that aren't addressed by products currently in the marketplace. In short, "everybody can be an inventor". I'm also STEAMED at the addition of "art" into STEM; I fear it will only serve to further disenfranchise the girls and women who need to get into, and understand, science and engineering.)

Today's craft was called "Fall Door Decor", but it was just creating a fall wreath. You purchased the wreath at Michaels; the store supplied the flowers, fillers, and the floral wire and hot glue to put it all together. The entire project should take about a half hour.

For children, the MAKEBreak project was to create a wreath from their own handprints. (Mom and Dad: if you've a place to store this next to their hand turkeys, you can try this again next year and show them how they've grown!) As it turned out, the hand wreath took more time than the grapevine wreath, but it turned out to be a great parent-child bonding craft.

As often happens with Michaels' floral crafts, the selection of materials will varies from store to store. Remember to sign up early for the best chance at finding a spot, and the best of the materials for your trend floral creations.

As always, there was the Saturday Morning Kids Club® from 10 to noon. Today's half-hour sessions focused on creating Craft Stick Characters.