Our Crown of Thorns and our Lamb of God--for the littles

We made our traditional crown of thorns craft today.

We use salt dough to make this.

You can find many, many recipes online for salt dough.

Laura braided the rolled out salt dough and then we shaped it into a wreath.

Mark and Grace enjoyed adding the toothpicks--which represent thorns. I have found, through experience, that if you break the toothpicks in half before inserting them into the wreath they are much easier to remove later.

Bake the salt dough crown at 200 degrees--for several hours--I think ours baked for about 4 hours before is was completely dry.
We have had a purple plate which we used for years for the crown to sit on. Today, I smashed it to bits, getting it out of the top of the cupboard. So, I found this tray at the thrift store and I had Mark paint it purple.

Once baked, Gracie got busy painting the crown brown.

"Perfect, Mark!"

Our goal is to do enough good works and sacrifices to remove all the thorns before Easter.

Our rule is that you do need to get an okay from mom before taking out thorns---so mom can check out the good works accomplished. For instance, it isn't acceptable to dump out all your toys on purpose, and then remove a thorn for each individual toy picked up. That just doesn't count, kids!!

On Easter morning our crown is tranformed into a beautiful crown of white roses.

The littles are using this very cute "Lamb of God". I first saw it on Karen Edmisten's Lenten post.

Amy made this one for me--THANK YOU VERY MUCH-my sweet artist!!--and the littles will countdown to Easter using cotton balls to fill in our wooly lamb.

And as an aside--

Tonight we went to Ash Wednesday mass, and when the priest said,"This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of world"---4 year old Luke called out, quiet loudy, "Hey, we have one of those at home!!"

We hope everyone has a very holy Lenten season.