There is most definitely a winding down of activities/effort/stuff going on in my world at the moment. This week’s schedule has been the least gruelling since I started this course and today has been a day where an 11am start and 6pm end had only four hours of productive work in it. This was my limited output from the first session – a couple of felt button hole flowers on my cardie.
I’ve never seen felting being done before and it was a bit of a revelation. Beautiful, colourful things can be made, even by a novice. It’s a great craft to get involved in because you don’t need any massively expensive equipment. I made these in about half an hour.
As is often the way with design and technology I found myself both frustrated and elated in equal measure. I was frustrated because in a crowded room with little space to work and a very limited time frame, there was only a tiny window of opportunity to experiment. At the other end of the emotional spectrum I was elated because I saw some truly lovely examples of felt work and am now inspired to have a go properly.
It’s easy to say as a novice sprogette teacher that I want to fill the worlds of the children who will end up in my care with beautiful things and the opportunity to be really creative. I’m sure that it’s really difficult to do though in a climate where literacy and maths dominate in terms of attention, effort and visibility. I’m really hoping that I can find a way to bring a little bit of the joy that I’m finding in this stuff to the lives of the children I teach.
Of course that assumes I get children of my own to teach and that’ll only happen if I can survive the course and graduate…