Felt bag making with children 1.
I hope that you will look at the bags above and be impressed that they were made by a group of three to six year olds! They are actually quite simple and a lot of fun to make, especially if you like to get wet and bubbly!
This is us working away in the art room.
Wool is a wonderful material for this age group to work with, they love the texture and really enjoy speading the colours in order to blend them. Of course the best part comes a day or two later, when you cut them open for the big reveal!
I have outlined the basic steps below.
- Help the children to draw and cut out a simple template for the bag, just a simple circle or square is all that is needed, not too big as this will make more work of the child, maybe four or five inches in diameter.
- if you are working with a group it is a good idea to write their name on the template. This will help later if they all take a shine to the same bag!
- wrap the template well in cling film, working in both directions, this is to make it as waterproof as possible, though it will soften a little as they work anyway.
- Template wrapped the children now get to chose their colours, I usually let them work with two. the felt can be broken off the ball gently in sections large enough to go around the entire bag at least once. Spread the colours before you wrap your template so that one will show through the other.
- Now that the bag is covered in the chosen colours it can now be wrapped in several layers of un-dyed wool or batting. This will be the inside of the bag, it provides the strength so do cover all holes, working in several directions.
part two of this process to follow!
What a busy summer!
I don’t know where the summer has gone! With a new baby settling in, a little pre-schooler art camp in July and another coming up next week, the months have flown.
I’m enjoying being so busy, each day is filled with so much action though, its hard to get time for ‘me’ things!
Every day we take a walk,either here in the hills near my home,
or we go to the beautiful lake beach and forest we are blessed to have only four miles away. We feed the ducks and swans and check out whats growing, my daughter is particularly interested in what is edible!
I have started to get up every morning between 5 and 6 to fit in a bit of writing time before the children wake, this seems the best way to fit it in and the silence at that time makes a nice change of pace!
The art camps are fun, I do felt bag making, collage, painting, gardening and baking, its wonderful to see their excitement as a project unfolds.
So this is how I end my days, exhausted but happy, loading the dishwasher before collapsing in the corner with a book, because it all begins again in a few hours!
my long post break and wild strawberry picking
I have taken quiet a long break from posting to this blog. This was partly because I have recently welcomed a baby to my home for full time care, and as I’m sure you know if you are a childminder who cares for babies, I’ve been busy! It’s not that I didn’t have a moment to myself, it is more accurate to say that my head was (and still is to a lesser extent) in a different place to that needed for reflective writing.
When a new child starts in my home, it is important to me how that relationship begins and how everyone involved, the baby, my children and myself experiences that transition. In this case, my youngest and the new child are only five months apart. Although in the future this will result in a close friendship for them, for now it creates confusing emotions for a child used to the undivided attention of the primary carer. But I think that we have begun to turn the corner on this and I have in recent days been able to enjoy moments of happy screeching as the babies begin to interact comfortably with each other.
I take the children outside daily and today was the first day in quite some time that we did so in rain. So all wrapped up in rain gear and plastic buggy covers, we set off down the road. We had the happy experience to find that a nearby crop of wild strawberries was ready for picking and small though they are, when we set off for home, we had a good handful for dessert. My daughter led the foraging, informing me that I should ask the grasshopper who was watching us, where the strawberries were hidden. Needless to say, we found the best ones…under some straw and also right down on the bottom of the bushes, near the ground. This was a learning opportunity for me, I needed to get to my daughters height to find the best of the fruit. A lesson in slowness and perspective!
When we came home the children supervised the baking of some meringues which were enjoyed with the fruit after dinner.