Crown of Thorns and Mardi Gras

In my first post on this blog, I mentioned that I have another blog where I post things about religion, family, and other things.  I want this blog to be all about crafting, DIY and home decorating stuff.  But...my faith is a BIG part of my life and inevitably it is going to be a part of my crafting, DIY and home decorating.  So...it's going to show up here from time to time!  This is one of those times!

Today is Ash Wednesday - the first day of Lent.  Today we attend mass and get our little smudge of ashes, abstain from meat and fast.  We do all of this in preparation for the next 40 days where we will focus on Christ's suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate death upon the cross.  I am always trying to find ways to make these church seasons and the activities that we do more real for my kids.

I have wanted to try and idea I've seen for the past couple of years which involves making a crown of thorns out of dough with toothpicks sticking out of it.  Every time someone does a good deed, they can remove a toothpick to symbolize lessening the pain on Jesus' head from the thorns.  There are tons of great ideas out there on how to make the crown.  Some are very complicated dough recipes, some are easier.  All are more than I have ever wanted or had time to do and my ADD makes it really hard for me to follow recipes.  But this year I found a great idea for how to make the crown that even I could handle doing!  I found this on Catholic Icing: How to Make an EASY (and cheap) Crown of Thorns for Lent.  She uses dollar store play dough, mixes it all together to make it brown, and then twists it into the crown of thorns.  See how beautiful hers is?

 

 

Source: catholicicing.com via Stevie on Pinterest

I decided that even I could handle this one! I was wrong!!

I got the play dough and divided it up amongst the kids and told them to start mashing them together.  This is the part I missed:

(Because blue is such a strong color, you might only need to add half the can of blue. Try half first- you can always add more.) The basic concept behind mixing brown is mixing all 3 primary colors (red, yellow, and blue).

 We added the blue and we got more of like a greyish greenish color.

The kids smushed and mushed the play dough all around.  They actually got tired pretty quickly though and guess who ended up doing a lot of it?

But it finally got done.  We rolled pieces of play dough out into long snakes and then twisted two together.  I actually piled two on top of each other to make it a little thicker.  We decided just to do on big family crown of thorns instead of one for each kid like Catholic Icing did.  Finally, after lots of mushing, rolling and twisting, we had a crown!  It might not be brown but we think it looks pretty good!

The kids have had a good time doing good deeds so they can take a toothpick out!

We also decided to have a little Mardi Gras fun!  I made purple, green and yellow pancakes for dinner!

The batter looks so pretty.  Then you put it on the griddle and it browns the outside making it look a little dull.  But they still taste like pancakes!! 

Did you do anything fun for Mardi Gras?  Are you doing anything special for Lent? 

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