to create an apple tree hat?

You get one of your kid’s caps, you pull out your storage box of odds and ends from projects past, and you do the best you can. 🙂

My son J has a book chat today, which involves a story about trees. He’s supposed to come in an apple tree hat, holding in his hands apples and apple juice. The apples were easy: we always have apples in our ref because the kids snack on them all the time. Apple juice was easy too: they take apple juice in tetra pack boxes to school for their snacktime. But an apple tree hat? With one hour to prepare?

Admission of guilt: Yes, I had last night to work on this; Queen Procrastinator didn’t really have to push it to one hour before departure time for the ride to school. 😛 But we had the book launch last night, which was extremely successful by the way 😉 and after that, our core group went to Larry’s Bar to eat our hearts out (there was extremely delicious food at the launch, but we of course could not eat as we were doing the rounds with the guests). In short, we got home pretty late, and I had a terrible headache after (too much eating after? 😆 ) so I went straight to bed with plans to make the hat this morning.

Now, I should say I have never seen an apple tree in real life. Mango trees, coconut trees, santol trees, starfruit trees, almost all tropical trees–yes. I’ve even climbed many of them in my childhood days. Apple trees, however, are not native to my part of the world. But… a tree is a tree is a tree. Especially when you have limited time and need to work with whatever resources you have on hand.

Thank goodness that last year my sister and I had a business project of providing gift basket packaging to the largest ex-pat grocery store in Malaysia. Because of that business (which involved loads of fun as we designed and handcrafted the packaging for the store’s gift baskets), I had leftover odds and ends–think leaves, branches, a little of this and a little of that.

Here’s what about half an hour of working resulted in (the other half hour spent rummaging for materials, haha!):

Having finished that, and with a very happy little tree-hat-wearing little boy, I find out… classes are suspended today because of some disorder in the streets (politically speaking). But that’s a completely different story… and one that is still unfolding on my TV set as I watch the news now.

At least, as it turns out, we have the hat ready now, way ahead of time. 😀