Leprechaun Door Sorta Tutorial

One more week of teaching Arts Focus, and I’ve taken a contract at work. So much going on that I’m starting to need to write things down, I’m pretty sure I have more projects going than I can even remember I’m working on at one time! But Friday Art Playgroup must go on!

This week we made leprechaun doors, since St. Patrick’s Day is coming up. Last year at Rebecca’s preschool they made leprechaun traps, which I think is a little bit awful. So I’ve tried to encourage an alternate mythology. On St. Patrick’s Day all the leprechaun’s come out to go house hunting, the young ones getting kicked out of their parents house, the empty nesters looking for smaller digs, time to shop around for a new pad. And if they see you’ve tried to make them a nice place, they may leave you some chocolate coins or jewels in appreciation. So we make leprechaun beds and hidey holes. But given Irish leprechaun lore of trickery and mayhem, perhaps traps are more appropriate.

For this project I put out lots of materials, sticks, popsicle sticks, toothpicks (actually one of the kids found those in the glue box, more power to them!), hot glue, masking tape, string, buttons & glitter glue. I stuck with sticks and string.

For my version of a door, start by sharpening two side posts (so you can push the door into the ground easily), and then lash four sticks together into a door frame. If you don’t know much about square lashing, I recommend How To Lash Two Sticks Together – Part 1 and How To Lash Two Sticks Together – Part 2, or you can just google ‘square lashing’.

Lash a raft of sticks together, leaving an inch of the cross pieces sticking out on one side, and loosely lash those onto your door frame.

Then, stick it into the ground. Not much of a tutorial, but I’m really supposed to be researching feature detection & tracking with OpenCV right now…

See, it opens! At least for a little while until the cotton string fatigues. Then I can tie it on with elastic or something. Which might last a couple months, and then I will… Get out the sculpture wire. That sounds like a better solution!

I love lashing. I may have neglected actually running the playgroup and concentrated entirely on my project. I can be a bit obsessive that way! What was the last thing you made out of sticks?