The importance of a varied art routine & the end of the trampoline safety net!

samstonehill (73)in #art • 3 years ago

Growing up in Switzerland my sisters and I had a huge trampoline we would bounce on regularly without a safety net, likely falling off it a few times too, yet never did we incur the kind of injury parents were going to bother themselves about for more than a few moments. So how is it that today all trampolines are sold with safety nets?

After two years of doing things in the expected way I grew tired of the net yesterday (which reminded me of a wrestling cage) and finally removed the safety structure, which you can see behind Esteban here.

And now the children are free!

Here they are with a wizard friend from the village.

Doing what is expected of children.

Yes, they are still wrestling, but it cannot be denied that life is more fun without safety barriers!

One can jump on and off with ease now, making the whole experience much more inviting.

Love how dirty they get during garden time. That's how it should be :)

Tomorrow I will move the trampoline down to the other side of the garden as we are keen to create more space at this end for vegetables.

And by the way, we will be cutting the net up and re-using it to grow peas & cucumbers. Even the metal poles will find new life as some kind of functional structure in the garden. Nothing goes to waste!

Give us this day our Daily Art

It is holiday time at the moment and after breakfast I insist on an art hour. Well, I don't have to insist any more. Now it is them doing the insisting, reminding me it is time to stop whatever I am working on and create an art project for them.

On this occasion we went outside to three different locations and sat for ten mins at each, doing our drawings.

As simple as this might sound, children absolutely love it.

The lower section of our village you can see stretching out behind us here.

The children chose this location because they wanted to draw 'the star building', situated at the top of our village.

Bit hard for Luna to see with her magic eye looking into the sun this way. We should probably be sitting with our backs to the sun looking out at the view, but this is what they wanted so I just went with it.

For the third position we adjusted our angle and sat outside the star building, looking out towards the stone house forest.

I would show you the results of this day but I honestly can't find them already! There are drawings coming out of every drawer in this house and art can get lost quickly. Around every three months I collect up everything and go through it with the kids to decide what gets kept and what gets recycled (usually into seed holders).

Pottery & functional art

I was learning pottery from age seven and remember really enjoying it, so I figured I would get them started on this one early.

It's a messy old game pottery, but that's just how it is!

Esteban is filling the blue cup with clay which has first been worked on the table to release the air bubbles.

Once the cup is removed he wets the clay and begins to use the electric wheel which is operated by a pedal on the floor.

At this stage it's all about how we move our hands & fingers. And foot!

The hardest part is keeping it central.

Great finger work here!

This is the face he pulls when it goes wrong.

And this is the face he pulls when he realises it doesn't matter.

There were no finished pots at the end of this session, but that's okay. We saved the clay and will try again next week.

Luna wanted to do something other than pottery so we grabbed these five bottles which were used last year as plant pots.

And we turned them into this.

The final job was to give them a make-over and Luna chose blue as the primary colour.

This is where they have ended up, on our living room shutter which can still be closed at night while the temperature is cold.

Last year we grew watermelons up that net from a pot on the ground. This year I have decided to try mangetout peas because as the name suggests (mange tout = eat everything) one can eat every part of this plant, pods, stems & leaves included, so even if they don't get too big we will still have a decent quantity for our salads during the early part of the Summer. Especially when I have kitted out the remaining three shutters with the same set-up.

I leave you with this shot of Esteban & a work of art he did a week ago (unprompted) as a gift for a friend at school. Those of you who read my grafting post will know what has been on my mind recently so it is enjoyable to see how I am not the only one who has been bitten by the rainbow tree bug!