Craft #18-Day 18-Pinecone Penguins

I asked Carter if he wanted to go outside and find pinecones; he was practically already out the door before I could say anything else!

Luckily, we didn't have to go far for the great pinecone hunt! We have plenty of pinecones in our yard to pick from. Carter was scurrying about picking up pinecones and placing them in his purple jack 'o' lantern bucket. I was looking for acorn shells, however the only thing I found were walnut shells. I figured these could be used for the faces of the penguins instead, so I picked them up. Carter quickly filled his bucket and we headed towards our patio table to start our project.

I already had large pinecones to cut the scales from, to use for the penguin's wings. Cutting scales from a pinecone sounded pretty easy to me. It was actually pretty difficult to cut the scales without breaking them. Next time I will have a pair of pliars handy to use. While I finished cutting the scales,Carter picked out two pinecones for our penguins.

Our pinecones had small stems at the bottom that we could use for the necks instead of using the top of another pinecone as suggested in the book. I used "Elmer's Glue-All" to glue the necks onto the top of the pinecones. Carter loves to paint, so he was very thrilled to start painting the scales for the belly of the penguin. We didn't have any paintbrushes, so we used q-tips instead, which worked out great.

While the paint was wet, I had Carter go ahead and sprinkle glitter on. I decided the glitter would stick well enough to the paint, so we didn't wait for it to dry to then add glue. Carter could have sprinkled glitter all day. His eyes were ablaze with excitement. I eventually got him to move on to help me glue the little penguin noses on the walnut faces, that I had already painted. I attached the faces to the necks and added the scales for the wings with glue. We let the penguins sit and dry for a couple of hours.

The book had a super cute example of a winter scene for the pinecone penguins. So we worked on that while our penguins were drying. Carter placed the stuffing on the white felt for our snow. He added glitter, gold and green sequins and blue glass pebbles to complete our snowy scene. We decided to make a couple of snowy pinecone trees. Carter was more than ready to sprinkle the glitter again! The sprinkles and glue gave our pinecone trees a snowy look.

Play time! Everyone was invited to the snow extravaganza!