Stars and Christmas Trees
Keeping up with seasonally themed workshops for winter, in December we got a little bit festive and went full-on Christmas crafting – but in a very eco way!! The young creatives had the choice of making Christmas trees by upcycling cardboard boxes, corks, scraps of fabric and old buttons. Or for those up for a slightly more technical challenge, origami stars using old damaged books and magazines.
The Christmas trees involved taping a chopstick between to pieces of triangular shaped cardboard, leaving a small ‘trunk’ sticking out of the base. These were secured with tape. Thinking back to the colour wheel exercises we had done in the previous workshops, the children were encouraged to think carefully about the colours for their tree – thinking of opposite colours, colour families and hot/cold colours. They selected fabrics accordingly and then spent spent a short while cutting them into small pieces to ‘collage’ their tree. They used generous amounts of PVA glue to attach the fabric to the cardboard, paying attention to wrapping around edges to disguise the cardboard and smoothing surfaces to ensure a neat finish.
The children then chose a contrasting yarn to wrap around their tree – not only did this secure the fabric, but it also represented the tinsel on the tree. The children then decorated their tree with baubles (old buttons) and paper stars. The final touches were to attach a piece of cork to the chopstick and glue gun this to a base – using old bottle tops or discs of wood.
Some children who worked quickly were able to make a few trees – creating a little forest of festivity!!!
The technical challenge for this workshop, for those up to the challenge was a bit of origami. This was an instruction heavy activity – each stage I carefully demonstrated and talked through. There are 2 processes to this activity. We started at stage 2 in the first instance which was making a star from a pentagon shared piece of paper. Once the children had got the hang of this, I introduced the technique to create a pentagon from a square piece of paper. Again, keeping the activity eco themed, we used scraps of paper from old books and magazine. This was certainly quite a challenging activity, but with a lot of effort and practise everyone got there – and their sense of achievement was huge!! Everyone went home with a good collection of stars and the knowledge to make more either for gifts or as decorations.
