Wooden, Silk, and Felt Maypole Sets

I love the month of May. I always have. The world is so colorful and there are rainbows everywhere! When my eldest babes were both born in the month of May, my love for the month grew even more. When my festival swap group opened up a swap for May Day, you can bet that I was one of the very first to sign up. 

I decided on making Maypoles. My supplies used were:

Birch rounds (large for the bases, mini for the tops)

Oak Dowels

Silk Ribbons

Peg Dolls

Scraps of hand dyed wool felt for the crowns

Scraps of wool felt for petals

Yellow roving for the flower centers

Drill (smaller drill bit and bit matching dowel size)

Saw

Tacky Glue

Hot Glue

Sugar Bear was more than thrilled to see me take out power tools to work on this project. 

The day before, I crowned the peg dolls using scraps of hand dyed felt I had left over from another project. I attached the simple crowns with tacky glue.

The first step in assembly was sawing the dowels down to the height that I wanted the poles to stand. 

I then drilled small holes in the center of each birch round, about half of the way through as a pilot hole and then drilled the larger hole for the dowel to fit in. I performed the same process on the mini rounds that I planned to use to top the poles.

I cut the ribbons to length, and hot glued them to the top of the pole. While that glue was still pliable, and after adding an additional smidgen of hot glue, I put the wooden topper piece on. My kids found a wooden ball with a perfect sized hole already drilled in it in our wood scrap bucket, so we used that for our personal Maypole. The other Maypoles were topped with mini birch rounds.

I was going to declare them complete at this point, but after referencing the drawing that Rainbow Girl had made for me to use as inspiration, I saw that I was missing something important! That was when we added the flowers on top, and I am so glad we did. They really finish the piece beautifully. 

The flowers were quite simple. I just cut out petals of varying sizes and glued them to the rounds, followed by a poof of yellow roving that I had mildly felted by rolling in my hands.