Nature Table

Finn has a Nature Table on our paved outdoor area (a nature table is really meant to be set up inside as a way of bringing nature indoors, but we lack space in our house, and his table is pretty large and messy!). Every time we go on walks he collects new things to add to his collection- feathers, rocks, sticks, seed pods etc. 

Today I thought we needed to add some people to the table so he could create some natural scenes, and I decided to use a gorgeous family of wooden peg dolls I bought recently on Etsy which I had been meaning to do something with. 

I made them to represent our little family, so I glued (using PVA) some felt for our clothes (Finn choose the colours he thought were our favourites), I tied a small bit of string around the middle, attached a bit of woolen hair (I used some unspun Alpaca fleece, but anything would do), and drew on some simple faces with a fine permanent marker. 

Then we created an island setting for them using rocks, sand, bark and sticks,  

and a seed pod worked well as a raft.. 

If you don't have wooden peg dolls to use, sticks can make really sweet gnomes as demonstrated on this site: http://thatartistwoman.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-make-gnomes-out-of-sticks.html