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via RSSMaking felt balls can be tricky for little kids. The hard part is the center ball, rolling the puffy wool up tightly is tricky, and then it usually turns into more of a pac man than a ball after they roll it around in their hands to felt it. Granted the problems disappear when you wrap on and felt a second layer, but some kids are getting frustrated by that point.
I’ve wondered for a while if you could use the prickly balls from sweetgum trees as scaffolding for felt balls, and you can! So I may try that with my class next year. Just take a dry sweetgum ball, and wrap wool roving around it, dipping it in soapy water to make it damp, continue wrapping and dipping until the prickles stop poking you, and then start rolling it in your hands to felt.
The prickles do a great job of catching the wool and making it easy to wrap. But, they are prickly! So I will have to get some opinions from some young friends about whether it is an overall win?
I read somewhere that (in China?) sweetgum seed pods are called something along the line of 1000 open beaks. But now I can’t find it! Has anyone heard something like that? Wikipedia says ‘all roads open’, but I am *sure* someone calls it something about lots of bird beaks. Which if you look closely at one, is quite disturbing!
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Add Yours →We call these things ‘spiky balls’ and they’re ALL OVER our backyard from the huge Liquid Amber tree. You can seriously roll an ankle on those crazy things! But non the less they’ve always intrigued me – and now you’ve given them a functional use!
And yes, the totally look like tiny bird beaks – yikes!!
xo
cortnie
Once you notice the beaks they suddenly move from pretty and interesting to sort of darkly creepy! I’ve never twisted an ankle, but I have stepped on them barefoot, not fun. My friend has a yard full of them and she is quite un-fond of them!
Ohhhh, I love this idea, too! Definitely going to try it! Once they are felted, I think it would be fun to have my botany-camp kids add stems (either natural sticks or crazy pipe-cleaner stems) and turn them into “truffula trees”!
When I was teaching in regular school, one of my art moms once brought in a lovely Christmas project involving sweetgum seeds. The kids each had one seedpod, and lots and lots of toothpicks. They dipped the end of each toothpick in glue, then inserted it into one of the holes in the sweetgum pod. By the time they were all filled up, it made a truly lovely sculpture that looked very much like a Christmas star if using round toothpicks and painted gold or silver after drying, or a sea anemone if using flat toothpicks.
I don’t know how you will get the stems to stay, maybe a drill! But sounds fun! I would love to see the output of your camp. The anemones sound fabulous, sweetgum balls have always fascinated me. They rattle around in the back of my head, but I haven’t had any other project ideas for them.