Remembrance Day Poppy Wreath

After taking down our Halloween footprint bunting during our major clean-up today, Gracen and I decided we needed something new on our apartment door – something to help celebrate Remembrance Day.  After searching around the web for a few minutes, we found this beautiful poppy wreath craft kit and decided we could make our own version.  We didn’t have red tissue paper on hand and it feels like we’ve worked with coffee filters a lot lately, so cupcake liners it was!  

Luckily, the project was so simple that we already had everything on hand.  Here’s what we used – a paper plate, 16 red cupcake liners, some black paper scraps (we later added in some green paper too), some green buttons, and some scissors, and glue.

After she’d selected the green buttons she liked best from our collection, I got the little miss started on cutting out our black flower centres.  While she’s done quite a lot of cutting in her 3 years (including practicing with our all-time favourite cutting tray), we’ve never really practiced cutting circles, so it was a good challenge.  I drew circles onto small black squares of paper and she practiced slowly turning the paper as she cut around the diameter of the shapes.

While Miss G worked on her job, I prepared our cupcake liners.  First off, I inverted them so that the red side was on the inside.

Then I trimmed off the edges of half of the paper cups with a wavy line.  I did the same to the other half of the cups, but this time about halfway down the liner, in order to make them smaller.

Next, I cut the centre out of our paper plate.

With all of our supplies ready, it was time to start assembling our flowers.  This was Gracen’s job and she really enjoyed stacking up the layers and making sure they were glued down well.  While she started creating the flowers right on the paper plate circle, she soon decided to assemble the flowers first and attach them afterwards, which worked just as well, if not better.

She then attached them to our paper plate ring, making sure to keep them close to one another.

The wreath looked beautiful as it was, but we decided to add a few paper leaves where we could see the white plate peeking out.

Pretty, right?

As soon as the glue had dried, we hung it up on our apartment door for all of our visitors to see.  Though we haven’t shared the full story behind Remembrance Day to Miss G quite yet, this simple poppy wreath is  our little way of showing that we remember, even from all the way over here in the desert.

See our simple modification that makes traditional poppies pin-less and safe for kiddos to wear.

For more fun not found on the blog, join us on Facebook or follow us on Instagram.