It feels like ages since we got our craft on around here, so today we took advantage of the gorgeous sunshine and took our art outdoors. We are fortunate enough to have a creek running close by our house and we often head down there, throwing stones and twigs into the water, and watching them float downstream. Today we took a basket along and R(3) gathered a few things here and there - stones, twigs, leaves. It was lovely to slowly amble along, stopping to inspect a rock, a tree, or a flower. Talking about what we were seeing. Feeling the rough textures of tree trunks, or the coolness of the stones on the ground. When we returned home, we took a walk around our yard and R gathered a few more items to add to his collection.

You can just make out the blue and yellow paint on one the stones in the above pic. These stones were painted during our Big Messy Art adventure a couple of weeks ago. When we finished up that day, I tossed the painted stones back into the garden bed. They make me smile every time I walk past them. They caught R’s eye too by the looks of things.

Once R was happy with his collection of natural items, we set up in the backyard to create some hanging art.

For this project, we used:

• A long, think tree branch (ours was about 70 cm long but any size would work)
• Found natural items (leaves, flowers, twigs, stones, pieces of bark)
• Fishing line (any thread would work such as cotton, nylon or silk)
• A sewing needle
• Paint and paint brushes

 We began by painting the long thick tree branch. R chose gold, blue, green and pink paint and he decided to save time by using two brushes at once!

You could wait for the paint to try before moving on to the next step, but we didn’t bother. A few pink and gold fingers never hurt anyone! I tied four lengths of the nylon thread to the painted tree branch. I didn’t measure them, there’s no need for accuracy with this project, but at a guess I would say they were around 40 to 50cm in length. I spaced them fairly evenly across the branch but again, I didn’t bother to measure that they were spaced exactly. This piece is all about the freeform beauty of nature, not precise measurements.

Once I had tied the four lengths of thread to the branch, I threaded a needle on to one of the lengths of thread and R began threading on items from his basket of natural goodies. This was the very first time R had used a needle and thread and he really enjoyed it.

It was such a relaxing afternoon, collecting natural items as we walked together, and then bringing them back home to create something lovely.

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