Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Bactrian camel in felt

Lucia and I attend a weekly parent-toddler program. For the first hour of the class, the children play and help make the muesli snack while the grown-ups participate in various craft projects. When grown-ups are working at tasks that the children can observe and sometimes even assist, the mood is both energetic and mellow. After the first hour of play, we all sing songs in a Circle Time, and then we prepare the room for the muesli snack while the teacher sets up the story in the next room. The teacher uses objects from nature like leaves, branches, rocks, and pinecones for the setting and hand-made felt and knitted figures to act out the stories. Afterward, we walk outside and feed the brood of chickens (give into the temptation to click on this link; you won't be sorry! June 2, 2005: I changed this link because the original one frizzled out.)

One of our projects earlier on was to design and sew felt animals for our children. You may recall my first effort, the duck/goose creature. Now I am working on more ambitious projects. So far, I am most pleased with the Bactrian camel:




I am posting my pattern in the event you wish to design and make some version of the camel:


3 comments:

Philip said...

Ooh, you need a crocodile! She knows the word already, she just needs a good example of one.

Saints and Spinners said...

Thanks!

Regarding the crocodile, I think that the body would be fairly simple (in an iconographic way) but conveying the bumps would be hard. I'm not up for that kind of embroidery. But hey, it could be useful for a retelling of "How the Elephant Got His Trunk."

Saints and Spinners said...

Galatea--
As noted in the post, I changed the collective noun link, but made sure that the "charm of finches" was still in the list. This new list has an alternative to "murder of crows" as "a storytelling of crows." How appropriate is that?!