Weaving a tree on a paper plate.

(I made the clip using the Shadow Puppet app on my ipad, am just experimenting!) Written directions follow below:

THERE IS 

Colour in or paint the paper plate first with a suitable landscape scene or in a colour to complement your tree.

Depending on your options for colour choices/wool, these trees can be "magic" trees (ie colourful), or you can use appropriate colours to create a spring tree or autumn tree etc...

Use a paper plate. Cut a wedge at the bottom and 15 ( or another uneven number) along the top of the plate.

Create your warp threads by placing the end of the wool in a small slot cut into the bottom wedge. Wrap the wool around the plate, placing each warp thread in each of the slots at the top. 

Finish the wrapping by tying the wool to the tail at the back. 

Starting at the top, weave your chosen threads into the warp threads, until you get about halfway down. 

To make the branches and trunk wrap a length of wool around two or three warp threads, eventually wrapping around the whole set of threads. 

Textured wool helps create more of a three-dimensional look to the tree. 

Paper plate weaving

Something a bit different and the children absolutely loved it - even my most fidgety pupils sat still and concentrated for the time it took to work on these!

1. Cut an even number of triangles/points around the edge of the paper plate - on reflection we decided we had too many as had cut quite small and most pupils had created between 30-40 points - we would suggest about 20-22 points (it depends on how many warp threads you want, or how fiddly you are prepared to get).

2. Wrap the wool twice around the most central part (ie halfway points) of the plate to make two warp threads and tie them at the back. You should then have an uneven number of cuts on one side eg 11 and an even number of cuts eg 10 on the other side.  Make sure you have numbers that are consecutive eg 13-14 or 9-10 as this means your warp threads are in the middle.

The threads here need to be moved over to have the right number of cuts on each side of them.

Back view

3. Tie the warp threads together with the end of a ball of wool and begin wrapping the wool around the plate, beginning with the cut (V) that is on the side with the highest number of cuts and tie at the back when done.

4. Now tie a weft thread in the colour of your choice to the centre of the warp threads. Begin weaving over and under the warp threads - work near the outside edge of the plate so that it is easy to see what you are doing. 

After working about a third of the way round, gently pull the weft thread in close to the centre, then continue weaving.  When you get to the end of your weft thread, tie a new colour (or the same colour if you want a thicker stripe) to the end of the thread and continue with the under-over pattern. Tuck the tails under the weaving so they are out of sight.