Pruning season is here, which means that many of us will quickly accumulate a small mountain of superfluous sticks. At my house, many pruned branches are given a second life as woven wattle fences, plant supports, and twig towers for growing vines in containers. If you’ve itched to make natural structures for your garden, pruning season is the best time to try.
I developed a love for mactac and pressed flowers when I was a girl. I have fond memories of being given a box of pressed flowers, some plain paper and mactac to create cards with. I think I still may even have a couple of those cards hidden away as keepsakes from my childhood. I thought it might be fun to do something similar with my girls. This past summer we collected and pressed flowers from our garden and in the wild. We thought it would be so nice to have these flower faces smiling at us in the window! It was such a treat to pull them out now and admire them in the midst of (this never ending!) winter. We really enjoyed playing with these flowers and creating pressed flower mandala sun catchers! They are simple to create. Here is a quick how to... To make you will need mactac (also known as clear contact paper) embroidery hoop pressed flowers suction cup for hanging To begin... Cut out two squares of mactac a little bigger than your frame. Decide on your layout for your sun catcher. Peel the backing off one of your mactac squares and secure (sticky side up) in your embroidery hoop. Gently place your pattern of flowers onto the mactac . When your design is complete, carefully remove it from the frame. Peel the backing off your other square of mactac and press it on top of your design. Place it back into the hoop. Cut off the edges around the hoop. Hang in your window to enjoy!! Wishing you all... abundant beauty in this day... and always! Only 17 days until spring! The count down is on. Hopefully these flowers will tide us over until the fresh ones pop up their sweet faces! In sunshine and flowers,
Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
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Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
A comprehensive look at bean supports and bean trellises for growing climbing beans. Includes the best way to grow beans using the three sisters method, an introduction to different materials, and instructions for making a bean teepee trellis and a double row bean trellis.
Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
Even when the temperatures are blistering hot, there’s nothing that I enjoy more than working in my garden. That includes decorating. I just get so much joy out of landscaping and turning my outdoors beautiful.
This is it. No excuses. Today is the day you start work on that idea that’s been brewing away for months!
Add year-round interest to your landscape with a willow arbor. This guide shows you how you can easily build one yourself.
Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
Detailed photos from my first She Art (adapted to be He Art :) project...week # 1 - more details on my blog at www.justaboutthedetails.com
My Gallery of Willow Sculpture and other basketry work.
Explore horticultural art's 23037 photos on Flickr!
Learn how to make a willow dragonfly craft in this youtube tutorial. Great willow craft for beginners, adults and children.
There's so much you can do to make your yard look beautiful using wooden sticks. Try these really creative Garden Projects Using Sticks and Twigs!
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Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
Creative garden features you can DIY for free using twigs, sticks, and branches. Ideas include trellises and plant supports as well as garden artwork
This week we also continued to study transportation. We have been taking a closer look at force and motion for all sources of transportation have a force, which creates the motion for it to move. We began looking at the invisible force called gravity. The students realized that gravity is the force that keeps things on the ground, is what pulls us back down when we jump, and much more. We watched a short clip of astronauts in space floating and saw how they eat and transport themselves around their space station. Showing the students that gravity pulls the ball to the ground or until another force stops it from moving. We explored gravity by rolling a ball down a ramp. At the end of the ramp was a tied string. The objective was to roll the ball down the ramp once, and adjust the ramps height each after each roll. The students were very encouraging towards each other. The teacher next door even commented that our students must have been having a great time because of all or their cheering and excitement! Blake noticed that he needed to lower the ramp almost to where it touched the ground in order for the ball to come close to the end of the string - otherwise it went too far. Atticus' ball ended very close to the end of the string. It was just a little past! To continue the students passion for making our classroom a "Nature Classroom" we continued working on our weaving. We added tree slices and buckeyes to the ends of the twine. We also added a piece of non-died brown paper behind the weaving. The paper makes the weaving stand out. Here is a final photo. The children have also been very interested in working with our natural wood slices in our "Engineering/Building" area. This week they made Willy Wonka's chocolate factory in honor of the Roald Dahl's chapter book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." The students have been encouraged to make a plan like engineers before building. Here are a couple photos of their designs. Also, we started working on our teepee. Thank you to those who have sent in branches, yarn, and ribbon. Here are a couple pictures of the beginning of a long process to create a teepee. Thanks again for stopping by our blog to see what we have been doing in our kindergarten classroom. Next week we will be as busy as this past week. We have a dentist coming in to share about dental health in honor of February Dental Health month. We will be having our dedication ceremony for our Kandinsky work, as well as our "Friendship" party this Thursday. Please send your child's Valentine's to school by Thursday in addition to their Valentine mailbox and/or mailbag. Have a beautiful week. Take care! Mrs. Julie Atkin
We are pleased to announce the arrival of two medieval visitors to Skipton Castle Woods. The Spirit of The Medieval Hunter and The Stalking Horse of Skipton Castle Woods. Artist: Anna and the Willow. @WoodlandTrust
Add a little glam to your deck or patio with these simple homemade Summer Star Twig Ornaments. A gorgeous nature craft for kids. Makes a great gift!
These were the unique Creative Willow Craft Ideas that you can try at home. You can also use colors to make it more attractive and unique.
Beautiful all natural woven willow fish ornament, made using either English willow from Somerset or organically grown Scottish willow. Handmade by basketweaver Anna Liebmann in Edinburgh, Scotland. Lovely as a bathroom decoration, or tie a few together as a mobile in the nursery. Perfect for babies to feel the texture of weaving and explore with hands and mouths! Ideal as a gift for a child, can be tied on to a stick with string for a 'fish on a rod' toy. Size is between ~14-20 cm long and on average 5cm wide. Each one is unique as it is made from a different piece of willow. If you would like a 'set' of fish which are on the small side or on the large side, or even if you would like them to be a different as possible from each other, just put a note with your order and I will choose from my shoal accordingly! The fish are made using all natural willow grown on the Somerset Levels, near Bridgwater, England, and organically grown willow from my own willow patch in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and other willow growers local to me. Willow is a natural and renewable resource, being cut every winter once the leaves have fallen, then graded for use in basketry, fence making and....fish in this case! I make functional baskets and teach traditional basketry in Edinburgh and beyond. I make these fish in my workshop overlooking the sea, as a small decorative taster of willow weaving past and present. The willow is soaked in water for a few days to become pliable, left to mellow overnight (just as in basketmaking!), then it is ready to use.
Here are the final pieces of willow weaving we produced over the past two weekends.
This cat is trying to look bigger than he is.
How to make classic homemade dill pickles using fresh cucumbers, dill, spices, and brine. This recipe follows a simple hot water bath method.
THE TREEHUGGER PROJECT Wiktor Szostalo and Agnieszka Gradzik create environmental art pieces that are literally tree huggers. Their sculptures are twigs, vines, sticks and branches woven together a…
This is a project I've been wanting to teach to my students for years, I've just simply never bitten the bullet and done it. Part of me, I think, thought it might be too time-consuming for students these days, who are used to that whole 'instant gratification' thing and seem to have less and less stamina/patience for projects requiring extensive time and concentration. I am happy to report, though, for the most part (except for three students- cough, cough) my students proved me wrong :) Update: see my newest version of this project HERE. I first read about twig weaving in a book I bought back in 1997 during my art university days: Nature Crafts for Kids It's full of really cool art projects using materials from nature. Here's a photo of the lesson below- it uses extra materials such as raffia and shells. I stuck with yarn as it's what I already had available in my classroom. The first step- locating twigs- is, BY FAR, the MOST important step!! Seriously, I had kids start with the wrong type of twigs and it all went downhill from there. I asked my kids to bring in a strong twig/branch that had at least one fork in it. Alot brought in flimsy ones ones they simply ripped off a tree (from outside of the school 5 minutes before class when they were reminded by classmates that they were supposed to bring in a twig for art, lol) These are too fresh and too bendy. You don't want the twig to be bendy or flexible at all (I mean a tiny bit it ok). So of course, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, lol. I went out twig hunting (hard to do when there's snow covering the ground- do this in the Fall!! Look for dried up twigs on the ground. You don't want anything too big, because those are the ones that students started and then, halfway into weaving, realized that in order to finish the project, they'd have to be weaving for like 20 hours, ha ha. Then choose your yarn colours. I mostly had thin yarn- this takes a long time to weave. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would only buy the nice chunky yarn you can get these days for knitting cool chunky scarves. Again, I used what I already had in the art room. Nonetheless, the thinner yarn looks LOVELY woven, so I don't regret that. Start with the warp threads. Tie one length of yarn (I used about 2 arms lengths) to the bottom of one of the forks. We used a neutral colour like white or cream yearn for this step, as it doesn't really end up showing much in the end. Wrap it back and forth between the fork, making sure to wrap it twice around each side- this helps secure it and make it strong and stay put. Don't wrap them too far apart or too close together- try to leave about half a centimeter or a centimeter between each warp thread. Wrap your warp thread TIGHT- no loosy-goosy- otherwise it is way too hard to weave; it's too floppy with no tension. Tie off the end of the yarn to the end of the fork (it helps to have an extra person help with this step so you don't lose the tension on the warps threads.) For the weaving part, we used these plastic needles from Roylco. I am obsessed with these. I use them for so many projects. They come in packs of 32 and are cheap. Cut off about two arm's length of the first colour you're going to weave with. Tie (double knot) the end to the bottom of one fork, just like the warp thread. Then thread on the needle. Start weaving vertically up through the warp threads- over, under, over, under. The first couple of rows don't look like much- it's once you get to row three that you can start pushing the rows down nice and snug parallel to the fork and it starts to look like an actual weaving. I had to keep telling the kids this b/c they were all complaining "mine doesn't look good!" etc. etc. Once you run out of the first colour, simply tie on a second colour to the end of the first colour and continue weaving. Some students only used one colour. how to tie on a new colour If you have more than one fork in your branch, you can weave the others, like I did here with my sample. Phew- all finished! It's a satisfying process though. Of course I like to take it a step further and added painted (acrylic) stripes to my branch. I thought this was a brilliant and very cool idea, an extra way to personalize the branch, but none of my students did it :( I felt it looked very "Anthropologie"-style . I often get inspiration from their window displays- I'm obsessed with them! Ta da! I was very happy with mine! Here's the students work- I taught this to a mixed group consisting of Grades 7 - 9. They all did well with it. My younger grades saw these in the art room and immediately asked "Why can't weeee dooo thaaat??!", so I did it with my other mixed elective class consisting of Grades 4 - 6. They also did well, but some of the Grade 4's needed help with the warp as well as really getting the hang of the weaving part. But all in all, they did quite well with it and LOVED it way more than my older kids did! I found that the students who had experience with knitting (many of my students take a popular knitting class at our school) did the best with this project. They were simply more confident in using yarn, having patience, tying knots, keeping the weaving tight, etc. Boys also do really well with this type of kinesthetic, tactile project. I had one boy ask if he could take his home to work on the school bus ride home- I love that! The yarn stayed surprisingly neat considering how many students were weaving throughout the week. Wrapping the warp threads below. This is one of the BIG branches- this student gave up halfway through and never finished. So don't use this size of branch!! Some of the completed ones: Grade 4 Grade 4 Grade 4 Grade 4 Grade 5 Grade 6 Grade 8 Grade 8 This was one of the large branches that actually got completed. This Grade 7 girl is a knitter, so she was very confident. The branch is about 4 feet long- It came out amazing!!! And she used thin yarn!! Grade 7 Grade 9 Grade 9
R-rustic
During the week 14th June all children took part in willow weaving workshops with Carol Beavis resulting in these beautiful sculptures. Many thanks to the PTFA for funding this Carol for running the workshops and to the children for the fantastic weaving!
