My and my youngest, love to make nature art. We both get so inspired whenever we are outdoors. Me, I've always been that way and my girls are always bringing me beautiful things that they find. Sticks, rocks, leaves. (Well my youngest two.)
Today I had to go into town. As I was cycling home, I saw this beautiful piece of bark, (that's me holding it, up above,) next to the road and I made a note to return and get it, later in the day, as I already had a lot of shopping with me. And I was quite enjoying freewheeling all the way home.
Later on, me and my daughter went for a walk, with the idea to collect it, along with some straight sticks and some flowers and greens. So that we could do some nature weaving. That's my daughter weaving a flower, through the loom we made. Which was made from 4 sticks and some orange wool.
It real is s great way to get your kids to concentrate, whilst they are making something, that really has immediate results. It's also s great way for them to practice tying knots, as you connect the four sticks together. Then you weave the wool from one side to the other, looping over each side.
Young kids, don't always have the longest attention spans, which is fine. So doing something that is fun and relatively quick is good. Plus I love seeing the sense of achievement they get, when it's done. After that, we moved onto the bark, which looks like it came from a palm tree. It was really windy yesterday, so I imagine that's how it ended up, on my road.
I'd quite like to make it into a mask. But for now it is adorned with flowers, leaves and dried cactus. There is a lot of dried cactus around here, the one that bares the prickly pear. Most of the plants in this area died off last year unfortunately. But they seem to be bouncing back now. Collecting them, was a wonderful opportunity to talk about plant health.
On top of that it's a wonderful material to use. We have plans to make fairies with them as well. You can see them, at the bottom of our nature creature. They look like wings already. They are so beautiful. It's so good to get to share this abundance from nature with my girls and get to be creative with them. Connecting with the plants, as we create with them.