Make It Monday: Popcorn Cherry Blossoms

One of the things I love about spring is seeing the trees start to bud. That new life and splash of green and is refreshing after the gloom of winter. My favorites though are the flowering trees. The pinks, the purples, the whites - all so pretty. We used to have a beautiful flowering tree in the front of our house. Pretty, that is, as long as the flowers were still on the trees. Once they started falling - and got glued to the exterior of our van - it wasn't so pretty anymore.  Even after we'd clean off the dead flowers, there would still be gunky residue left on the van. Yuck. 

Leighton cut down the tree and filled the space with concrete to expand our driveway. While I don't miss the dried flower gunk or having to walk through the mud to get from the van into the house, I do miss the pretty flowers.

Not to worry, we now have our very own cherry blossoms . . . inside the house.

To make the tree trunks, we traced each child's hand and arm.

Then, they colored them.

You'll need popcorn and pink/red/purple JELL-O for the blossoms.

Pour both the popcorn and the JELL-O powder into a bag.

Make sure the bag has no holes. One way to check is to pour them in and shake. If the powder spills out all over the table, there is a hole. 

Ask me how I know.

Once you pour the popcorn and powder into a new bag - one with no holes - shake, shake, shake it up!

Squeeze dots of glue all around the tree and place popcorn in each one.

Our blossoms were more purple-y than the pink I had originally envisioned. That's what I get for letting Jake, Mr. I-love-everything-cherry, choose the JELL-O. The color did change to pink once they touched the glue though. Also, I sprayed them with hair spray to ensure that the powder stuck and to turn them pinker.

I could have spritzed them with water to bring out the pink, but I remembered what would happen!

Of course, there was plenty of popcorn eating as well. And messy, sticky fingers. And dirty faces. And a powdery table. All the very best things about crafting.

Jake liked the popcorn so much that he asked if we could make it for Tasty Tuesday. It's no wonder he liked it; it tasted just like the fruit-flavored pancake syrup we made.

Aren't they pretty! There's really no wrong way to place the blossoms. The ones off the tree look like flowers that the wind blew away. (Good thing there's no van next to it!)

We got 3 beautiful cherry blossom trees (without the hassle of the clean-up!) and a tasty snack to boot? Sounds like a great springtime craft to me!


Hope you have fun making your own flowering trees!