I wanted to make sun catchers with Buddy this summer, but we never got around to it. A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that it would be really cute to make fall  sun catchers. However, our October has been crazy, and we just didn’t have time. This week, Buddy was sent home sick from school, which meant that we had extra time at home with nothing to do. So we finally got around to making  fall sun catchers.

While Buddy napped, I prepped the materials. I cut red, orange, and yellow tissue paper into small squares and put it in ziplock bags. Next, I used a crayon to draw a pumpkin and some leaves on black construction paper, and then I cut them out. Since it’s almost Halloween, I decided to make the pumpkin a jack-o-lantern. The shapes were put on top of a large rectangle of Contact paper. Then, I used painters tape to keep the edges of the Contact paper from curling up.

Once Buddy woke up, I put him in his highchair without the tray. We started by just putting orange tissue paper on the pumpkin. Buddy was a little unsure at first, but he quickly decided that he liked putting the paper on the sticky surface. He started with a few squares at a time, but towards the end he was grabbing large handfuls of tissue paper and throwing it all over the paper. After the pumpkin was mostly covered, we moved on to the leaves. I had to thin out some of his tissue paper clumps, but the majority of the color was done by Buddy. Once we were done with the tissue paper, I put another layer of Contact paper on them and cut out the shapes.

Buddy had a great time with this activity. It was the perfect easy craft to break up a long sick day at home. I’m sure we will make sun catchers again. Our final products were nice enough that I plan to save them and put them up again next year!

If you have any other easy fall crafts, I’d love to hear about them. I’d like to try something Thanksgiving related in the next few weeks.