Mini Fall Lacing Wreath: TP Rolls and Ribbons

When I was teaching preschool, I loved to come up with ways to use ribbons.  Perhaps my favorite way to use ribbons was to encourage lacing through our chain link fence.  I remember watching a large group of girls, who didn’t normally play with one another, swarm to the activity.  They thread the ribbons through different chains and, when they tried to take them off to use them in a new way, they often needed help from nearby workers.  It was lovely to see something so simple encourage team work.  I tried to think of how I could use those left over ribbons (because, of course, I took them down and kept them to reuse!!).  After making this tree with TP rolls, I was inspired to use TP rolls with ribbon.  And, that’s how our mini Fall wreath came to life!

Here’s all I needed to start this project:

I had four TP rolls (with a preschooler we seem to have more of these around the house!), ribbon, and scissors.  I cut each roll into thirds which left me with twelve circles, or links.  Then, I cut small pieces of ribbon to tie each TP link together.  Here’s it looked like:

**NOTE: If I did this again, I would just staple the TP circles together.  Not only would that be faster, but the knots in the back of the wreath got in the way as my daughter tried to weave the ribbon in and out.  You live and learn, right?! 🙂

Then, I tied them all together until i had a circle formed – the beginnings of the wreath!

Next, it was time to start weaving ribbon.  I have a vast number of fall colored ribbons, so Lil chose which colors she liked best.  My daughter isn’t one to gravitate towards fine motor activities like this, so I encouraged her by talking about how we were making a fall wreath to put up somewhere in the house.  But, she lost interest after she thread one ribbon all the way around the wreath.  So, we left the wreath and came back to it a few days later.  Sometimes, it’s nice to just let a project sit!

When we started work again, we added new layers of ribbons.  I started calling the ribbon a snake that needed to slither through each hole – Lil adored trying to get the “head” of the snake (one end of the ribbon) to the “tail” of the snake (the other end of the ribbon).  Since my daughter is a dramatic play junkie, the analogy really caught her attention and made it fun to lace!

I had a blast watching her do something that she doesn’t usually gravitate towards.  She challenged herself and, in the end, added something beautiful to our home.

Your turn!

Will you be making decorations this Fall?

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