Making a Dream Catcher using natural, found objects and at the same time ticking the boxes of three STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and the Arts) practices:
The Science (making dough with salt, water and flour for the beads)
The Arts (designing and sculpting the salt dough leaves, and assembling your dream catcher)
The Maths (geometry of weaving a pattern with a single length of twine)
This is such a fun project. And one that you could do either indoors or outside in the warmer weather – we really love a craft that all ages can enjoy – and this three sides dream catcher can be a bit of a challenge when it comes to the weaving, so we will link some YouTube tutorials at the foot of this article so that you can get acquainted with the dream catcher weaving geometry at your leisure.
Before you get started, make sure you have everything you need for your beautiful natural dream catcher – go on a nature hunt, look for feathers, acorns, pine cones, and lots of sticks!
You’ll need some cotton string, or strong yarn, and we also made some colourful salt dough beads and ‘leaves’ so that everything is biodegradable – this means you can eventually hang your dream catchers outside in the garden or the woods, for them to let nature decay them – hey, that may even be a bit of a science lesson right there too!
Salt dough leaves and beads recipe
- 1 part salt
- 2 parts plain flour
- half to one part water
- optional – some natural food colouring (if you are feeling ambitious – you could go as far as making your own dough dye with beetroot! hey – experiment, have some fun)
We mixed the dough into three bowls, and added three colours – subtle so that they would blend well with nature – and rolled small balls, pushing a skewer through to make a bead, we dried the beads by ‘stringing’ them onto metal skewers and propping up off the baking tray to harden in the oven on a very low 100 degrees temperature, checking on the beads after about fifteen minutes, and turning them on the skewers so that they didn’t stick.
The leaves we made by rolling the dough out to about 5mm thick, and used a leaf shaped cookie cutter and a knife to score the marks on the ‘leaves’ and push a hole at the top of the leaf to allow it to be attached to the dreamcatcher. Again, we allowed these leaves to harden, baking them at the bottom of the oven, for about half an hour to an hour, using a cooling rack from the kitchen. We made these beads and salt dough leaves in advance of our dream catcher construction to allow them to harden – word of warning – don’t let them get damp, they will go soggy!
The assembly of your dream catcher
Now you have everything you need, start to pull it all together. Make a triangle from three sticks of the same length, tying them tight in each of the three corners.
Make a ‘bobbin’ with one short stick, about 4cm long, wrap the yarn around and around until it’s full of yarn – (you’ll have to experiment, but you’ll need enough yarn to create the geometrical pattern on the dream catcher ‘web’).
Using the yarn on this bobbin, start by tying a knot next to one of the three corners of the triangle frame.
Get weaving that web
As you start to ‘weave’ your web the first row can be quite loose.
Evenly spaced, start to work the yarn around the triangle:
- Pass the end of your yarn around a stick.
- Bring the end under the straight part of the yarn.
- Bring the end up and pass it through the eye of the loop you just made.
- Pull it tighter to complete a half hitch.
- Tie the hitch the same at each intersection of the yarn.
- Continue around the triangle, to ‘row two’ in the same way, see diagram (and the video links below)
- The next hitch is made at the midpoint of the first loop in the first row.
As you tie these hitches you start to pull each stitch in the web a little tighter. Continue around the web tying a hitch and pulling tighter on each row until you are down to a small centre hole in your web. Tie it off in a knot.
Now tie three strands of yarn from the ‘bottom’ of the triangle and attach the beads, feathers, leaves – And tie a hanging loop at the top of the triangle and you are ready to decorate the trees by hanging your wonderful dream catchers in the forest – or, if you REALLY want to catch those dreams in your web, hang your natural dream catcher up in your bedroom for a real conversation starter!
We would love to see what you create – do tag us on Instagram where you will find our new account https://www.instagram.com/kidschaos_blog/ use the hashtag #31DaysofLearning as we are joining in with KiddyCharts creative STEAM project this month.
Ali also writes over on incredibusy.
Cotton yarn: Wool and the Gang.
Shoot location: fforest, during the fforest gather workshops.
Tap here for a YouTube tutorial of the weave
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