Sunflower Garden

For the last few days we've been seeing a fawn from our table. We love them so much. 💞

Trees for our spring meadows. Clay base, painted, then wool for leaves. I did the wool, with a little help from a felting needle.

Part two of wet felting spring meadows - adding color. Like drawing and painting, and children, each one is different and each one is beautiful.

Another Maypole friend. 💗

A Maypole friend. We made twisty twirlies for our maycrowns.

Happy May Day! We had our Maypole Festival this afternoon. Dancing around a maypole in Spring is such a joyful thing to do! We were blessed by beautiful weather, and April showers bringing May flowers. The gaillardias are here in the meadow en masse now, with Western honey bees everywhere. Aka blanket flowers, firewheels, Indian blankets. They looked gorgeous in the maycrowns, along with the smaller, yellow Navajo tea flowers, prairie verbena and blue-eyed grass. Our potluck snack afterwards was a lovely time to chat with other families.

Wet felting spring meadows - step one. Wisps of multi-hued green wool and silk roving over kiwi green batting. Even the youngest children can make beautiful wet-felted pieces. Working it with their hands, and doing that for the plus twenty minutes that it takes, are so good for strengthening will forces, and for sensory integration. Wool is natural, and using wool is archetypal. It has a deep human history. Love wet felting.

The balance beam. They spent more time building it than they did walking it, which is how it usually goes. We took several layers off the garden beds, but left the tent around the sugar snap peas for this weekend's freezes.

Spinning tops are our last craft before Christmas. We are the elves making toys - sawing, sharpening, sanding and glueing the sticks in place before painting the tops and making them sparkle. They spin so well! So fun! Solstice and Fourth Sunday in Advent blessings.
The fourth light of Advent
Is the light of you and I,
Light of love and thought
That we may understand.

Veteran's Day and Remembrance Day fall on the same day as Martinmas, the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours (316-397AD). Saint Martin spent much of his life bringing Christianity to France and became one of her patron saints. It's another festival of light in the fall that leads us to the winter solstice and the celebrations in many faith traditions that happen around that time. Saint Martin is especially remembered for an incident when he was still in the Roman Army, where he cut his warm officer's cloak in half with his sword and shared it with a half-naked, freezing beggar sitting outside the gates of Amiens. It's a deeply meaningful image, reflected in the light protected in our lanterns, which we carried on our lantern walk on Sunday evening. I came across a C14th illustration of Saint Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar. It's been a powerful story for a long time!