An Autumn Story

An annual re-posting of this Autumn story and play that I wrote with Boo's help many moons ago.
It can be printed out and read or used as a script for a play or peg doll puppet show.
The girls loved it when they were little. Enjoy :)

 

The Elfin Tree

Characters

  

Narrator

Elf

Squirrel

Fawn

Rose Hip Fairy

Primula Fairy

Script

Narrator:  Once upon a grassy meadow, Little Elf noticed a small sapling growing in the glade by the big woods. 

It looked just like the other trees only smaller. She was intrigued! 

She thought she might plant it in her own garden to see how big it would grow.   

Maybe it would it grow as big and tall as the trees that grew in the woodland beyond.

After she had planted it, she felt very proud of herself indeed. 

Every week through the hot summer, Little Elf watered the tree so it wouldn’t get thirsty.

One day after a good many weeks had passed, Little Elf came to water the tree again but when she looked at it she dropped her watering can and the water spilled all over the grass.

Elf:  What has happened?

Narrator: The tree’s leaves were red, gold, orange and brown. Not fresh and green as they had always been!

Elf: “My poor little tree, maybe I am not feeding you well, maybe you are sick”

Narrator: Little Little Elf started to cry. She went to Primula the Spring Fairy and said...

Elf: "Primula Fairy, please help me. Something awful has happened to my tree. The leaves were green but now they are red, yellow and brown.
Am I not feeding it well?"

Primula Fairy:  "See how my yellow petals have turned to seed. All things change with the Autumn breeze! Come now Elf don’t you cry. Go and ask Squirrel she’ll know better than I."

Narrator: So Little Elf went to Squirrel's tree house to ask her. But she was busy collecting nuts, and not in the mood for answering questions. So Little Elf  decided to ask Fawn.

Elf: "Fawn, please help me. Something awful has happened to my tree. The leaves were green but now they are red, yellow and brown.
Am I not feeding it well?"

Fawn: "My spots are fading fast you see, all things change with the Autumn breeze. Come now Elf don’t you cry. Go and ask Rose Hip the Autumn Fairy, she’ll know better than I."

Narrator:  So Little Elf ran back passed Fawn, then passed Squirrel, then passed Primula Fairy until finally she found Rose Hip the Autumn Fairy.

Elf:  "Rose Hip Fawn, please help me. Something awful has happened to my tree. The leaves were green but now they are red, yellow and brown.
Am I not feeding it well?"

Narrator: Rose Hip turned to Little Elf with a gentle smile and said...

Rose Hip: "Of course you are feeding it well. 
The season is changing that is all. 
Time flows like the trickling stream that runs through the Big Woods. 

When it was Spring the leaves were green, but now it is Autumn. 
The leaves change colour and eventually fall to the ground. 

It will soon be winter and your tree will be bare but don’t cry because Mother Nature knows what she is doing. Your tree isn't sick, it's just sleeping.

After Winter it will be spring once again.
For Spring always follows Winter.

In Spring you'll see new baby leaves and blossom budding on the tips of its branches.

 Narrator: Little Elf was very grateful and was also very happy. In fact she was so happy she had a party and invited all of her friends to come!
They danced and sang until tea time.
Every animal brought something from the autumn harvest: sunflower seeds, barley bread, sweet corn, ripe plums, apples, hazelnuts and elderberry tea!
They all had a lovely time, eating, drinking and dancing around the golden, shimmering tree.

Elf: I love my tree

Narrator:  Little Elf, snuggled up in a cosy nest of moss at it's roots.

The End.

Beach Pottery

 My hands are itchy, they have to make, craft, form and mold. Even if that means simply arranging flowers in a jar, quotes in a journal or feathers on a windowsill.

We found these beautiful chalk pebbles at the sea a couple of weeks ago.

In their perfectly formed clods I saw a bird, a pear, a whale, a bear.... The children were inspired.

I used to love to use charcoal as a medium. It is messy. Beware and prepared with old shirt's and warm soapy cloths on hand. 

I remember buying some shards of charcoal years ago ( the brittle stick type they used to sell ) with my school trip pocket money. Scarcely holding the feathery sticks between my fingers lest they disintegrate I made endless spidery lines that would eventually be smudged to incoherence.

 The beauty of charcoal is it washes off the stone quite easily if you make a mistake. I will seal these pebbles with clear nail polish to preserve their designs.

A Fairy Picnic

Lavender Cordial

cream cheese and parsley sandwiches {with the crusts cut off}

wild strawberries from our garden

 Sharing with Little Things Thursday &
Made by you Mondays

Winter Salve

 

 Good for Winter-chapped hands, feet and lips.

Puppet Making with Paper and Cloth

Inspired by this simply magical post by Rima Staines of the Hermitage, the older girls and I decided that making puppets would be our Summer project.

 However, it was a far more complex undertaking than I realised it would be.

It took from August to late November to finish our puppets in the end.

The girl's each had quite definite and ambitious designs in mind.

 I wanted to be able to help them to accomplish these without too much frustration so the puppets really ended up being collaborative efforts. 

I provided, technical support when threads needed threading and untangling and re-stitching.

They engaged, with guidance only in the processes that they could manage without help such as applying glue and paper to the heads and shoulders, cutting out the hands, whittling the sticks that hold the puppet's strings and stitching the fabric squares that made up the puppet's clothing.

We worked together on  painting  the faces and on stitching around the puppet's hands.

 

 This little man is named Thorfinn after the enchanting fairy tale by Vivian French and Jackie Morris "Singing to the Sun"

 His hands are made of wool filled cotton interlock.
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His gown and hat are made of two squares of cotton print fabric.

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His head and shoulders are molded out of papier mache.
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 His strings are made of hemp twine strung to two hand whittled pieces of wood, kindly donated by one of the trees in our village green.

He also  has a little bell sewn to the top of his cap of which he is very proud.

I wanted to create a puppet design that would be easy enough for the children to handle and manipulate. 

This meant the design had to be pretty simple, flexible and weightless. 

However, I also wanted them to easily express their puppet's character by manipulating it's movement.  

I think this was achieved by using large squares of flowing fabric for the puppet's gowns as they gave the arms a good reach and lots of flexibility.

Thorfinn also, actually has two strings threaded through his head. 

One comes out through the front and one pokes out of the  point of his cap.

Using two strings for the head like this, allows the puppeteer to direct the angle of the head with ease.

Thorfinn can be made to look down by pulling the thread that runs through the back of his head while slackening the the thread that pokes out from under the front of his cap.

 

This gives poor Thorfinn a rather melancholy air. 

But never fear! 

By tightening the front string and slackening the back one his joie de vivre soon returns.

The girls' whittled the wood and rubbed it with my homemade beeswax salve.
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His hair is made of Merino wool roving and stuck into place using a non toxic craft glue. 

I used my longest, scariest doll-making needle to stitch the strings through his head and cap before gluing his cap to his hair line with more copious amounts of  craft glue.

Florence, as ever unmoved by the general chaos of her household.
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 Matilda and I worked on this elegant character. Her name is Lady Elspeth Barley.

Boo's creation is simply magical. He is a Celestial Bird Boy!

Here is poor Thorfinn looking a wee bit undone. 

You can see how we shaped the head, neck and shoulders from this picture. 

To paint the faces we made up a large batch of skin tone in acrylic; One pale, one cool and one slightly warmer in tone for shading. 

We applied the skin tones and waited for them to dry thoroughly before painting the facial details and sticking on the hair.

To make the basic head and neck structure, we scrunched up a sheet of newspaper in to a ball, leaving enough to twist a sketchy neck and shoulder shape with the same sheet to avoid having to stick pieces together.

We molded the face by sticking pieces of ripped up newspaper onto the structure with PVA glue.

The  bodies were made by placing two pieces of fabric right sides together and stitching all the way around leaving gaps along the top and on the top two corners for the head and hands to fit through and be stitched in place.

On a roll of sorts I decided to use a similar process to create some cloth puppets using the Waldorf method for molding their heads. 

It was certainly easier to thread twine through a wool filled head than a paper filled one!

More inspiration

  The video above describes beautifully why puppets and puppetry helps children connect with their imaginations.

I love the simplicity of this Waldorf style Puppet play using marionette style dolls.