Advent Wreath Craft for Catholic Kids

By Lacy

We’re getting ready for Advent around here, and I love making Advent wreaths with my kids. Last year we made a functional Advent wreath craft with birthday cake candles, and we love those! This year we tried something a little different that’s cheaper and easier for little kids.

 Craft Supplies Needed to Make these Advent wreaths:

• Pipe Cleaners (1 Green and 2 Yellow per wreath)
• Pony Beads (24 purple and 8 pink per wreath)
• Green tulle (you could substitute ribbon, fabric scraps, or evergreen)

That’s it! These are super easy to put together. I wanted to think of something that didn’t involve a Styrofoam wreath because that stuff is so expensive! What are they thinking charging those kinds of prices for Styrofoam??? So start by making your green pipe cleaner into a circle, and twisting it together.

 Take a yellow pipe cleaner, and cut it in half. Then fold one piece in half again, and pinch it over your green circle. This will be your first “candle”.

Take a pony bead, and put it over both ends of the yellow pipe cleaner. Push it down firmly. The force of the beads will hold your candle upright.

 Put 7 more pony beads on, so 8 total for each candle.

 Push all the beads down firmly, then open the pipe cleaner ends to hold them on.

Then shape the top like a flame on a candle, bring the 2 ends together, and give them a twist.

Repeat until you have an Advent wreath with 3 purple candles, and 1 pink one.

Now add “greenery” around your wreath. We first did this by tying little pieces of tulle all the way around, tu-tu style. To do this, I’d say you need to cut your toulle in pieces about 3 inches long. If they’re a little wider, the wreath gets full faster.

We used several shades of touille to do this. You can either get tulle from the fabric section (it’s very cheap per yard) or you can get it in rolls in the wedding section of craft stores.

It does take some patience to tie on enough pieces of toulle to make a full wreath, so I decided for my little kids, to give them one long piece of touille and let them wrap it around and around the wreath instead.

This worked very well. When you get all the way around the wreath, just tie or tuck in the ends. It’s a very fast alternative to all the tying. You could definitely substitute cheap green garland, evergreen, fabric scraps, green ribbons, or whatever else you can think of for the wreath.



AND

by Lacy

I’ve been crafting Advent wreaths with my preschool co-op, my own children, and, well, pretty much every Catholic child that I come in contact with! 

As I’m sure you can instantly tell, this advent wreath is child sized, and crafted with pink and purple birthday candles. This is a great way to have fun with kids for advent!

These wreaths can be made for about a dollar a piece. The Styrofoam circles I got 2/$1 at the Dollar Tree, along with the “wired pine”. I cut the center of the circles out ahead of time with a seraded steak knife to make it a wreath shape. (Use caution when you do this please!) You can buy small pre-made Styrofoam wreaths at AC Moore for $1.50 each, but I needed several for my preschool co-op class. I also got enough red berries at the Dollar Tree for all the wreaths for just $1. The birthday candles came from my local grocery store for .99/box. Obviously, you need pink and purple, so you will need 2 boxes.

Have the children paint the wreaths green. They love this! I know you could start with floral foam which is already green, but that stuff is super crumbly and will make a big mess with small kids. It also won’t be durable. It doesn’t matter if they don’t paint it perfectly, but try toencourage them to paint the inside and outside of the circle as well asthe top. As you can see, we used foam brushes. I think foam brushes areespecially handy for small children.

After painting, allow to dry.

The wired pine we used as kind of a lacing exercise. It’s not glued at all, just wound around the wreaths and twisted together at the ends.

We let the kids squeeze on their own glue and stick on the clusters of berries. It’s ok if they use a lot of glue – it will dry eventually! 

Because the regular Styrofoam is stiffer than floral foam, you can’t stick the candles right in. First, poke the holes with a Philips head screw driver, and have the kids insert the candles themselves.

Here’s one that I made where the pine stuff was all glued on top of the wreath with a glue gun. We’re going to be using this as my class’s advent wreath on our prayer table.

The kids in my class had such a great time making these! 

Here’s Julian’s. He is so proud of it!

You can substitute other Christmas greenary for the wired pine.
Just attach with glue.

Yes, these are working advent wreaths, so they can be lit. But please use caution and don’t burn your children… or you teddy bear. 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I’ll see you back here on Monday with a very special (and unprecedented) Cyber Monday post!!!  Don’t do any of your Catholic holiday shopping before then!!!