Twig and Maple Seed Dragonflies

I've seen these a few places before, but I really fell in love with the sparkly wings on those that were made at Twig and Toadstool, and knew Kaia would adore them. It was too late in the year for us when they posted theirs last Fall, and no whirlygigs, (or whirlybirds, helicopters, maple keys, or maple seeds!) were to be found, so this project was a long time coming. This year, we were not going to miss out!

You will need some maple seeds, paint and paintbrush, hot glue, twigs, small or seed beads, and either glitter glue, or craft glue and glitter. Cut the wings off of all the seeds.

Match them up into sets, you will need four wings per dragonfly. Kaia had a lot of fun matching them up, then she painted both sides of each wing. She wanted a rainbow of dragonflies, which is not terribly shocking, as she wants a rainbow of pretty much everything. :)

Then she painted the twigs, and, if I do say so myself, I love the way they came out. I showed her how to make stripes on a spare stick, and then she went to town with stripes, spots, and blotches.

We did not have every colour of glitter glue, nor did we have every colour of glitter, so we did a combination. The glitter definitely came out shinier, but they are all pretty. Kaia painted the red and orange wings with glitter glue, and the rest I covered with a coat of Mod Podge (you could simply use craft glue, as well,) before Kaia dumped on the glitter. I was able to do all four wings of each colour at the same time by first putting a dusting of sparkles on my "glitter dump sheet", coating both sides of all wings in Mod Podge, and setting them on the layer of glitter, which kept them from sticking to the sheet as I finished gluing up the others. Then Kaia, ever so liberally, covered them in sparkles. I gave them a little toss in the sparkles before taking them out and funneling the glitter back into its tube.

Lastly, simply hot glue the wings to the twig bodies, and hot glue the beads in place as eyes. You have cute little dragonflies!

Here are all of ours.

We tied strings around them and hung them from the lamp over our dining table.