Last year around the holidays my daughter was still a little baby and my son wasn’t yet in Pre-K. We had to entertain ourselves for a lot of the coldest winter days and this was by far one of his favorite crafts (he is not into crafts so whenever I find something he likes I know I’ve struck gold).

I really like pinecone crafts because they allow you to find some of the materials in nature. Finding the perfect pinecones was half of the fun for this project (if you don’t have them near you they are also readily available around the holidays in craft stores).

Craft Materials:
4 pinecones (the small round ones really work the best, we used an extra small one for the baby)
1 wine cork
Hot glue gun and glue sticks
Felt squares in different colors (I chose red, green and white for the holidays)
4 wooden beads
A red and black marker for drawing on the faces (you can also buy beads with faces painted on if you want to skip this step)

Make It:
Begin by cutting the bottoms of your parent and older sibling pinecones so that they are flatter. They don’t need to be perfect, just remove any stems or large bumps. Next, I took a synthetic wine cork and cut it into 1/2″ rounds to serve as the base for my pinecones. This was a really important step to stabilize them. Hot glue the pinecones to the base.

Next, cut out little scarves, hats and gloves for your family. You can also make a little swaddle for any little ones. Then draw on your faces into the beads.

Once all your outfits are cut and your faces added, Hot glue the outfits to the family. Begin by adding the scarves. Next add the beads for heads. Make the parents and older children first. If adding a swaddled baby, add that after the scarf and head are on the mom.

The next step is adding the hats. Making the little pointy hats was by far the trickiest part to not glue myself with hot glue (do not allow young children to help with any of the glueing). Wait a bit for the glue to cool before forming the hats to spare your fingers. Once all the hats are added, add the gloves to finish.