Weaving Stories of Boodja

It was a couple of weeks ago now that we launched into the creation of our final sculptures for the Cowaramup Community Garden. We had an idea to bring the garden to life by creating a collection of animals to live within the garden space. The first animal on our list was the creation of the local Masked Owl, such a majestic creature, this bird sits close to our hearts. 

Weaving large animal sculptures was new to both of us, so we invited local Artist Cynamon Aeria to join us on this creative pursuit to help guide us with this part of our project. 

Our workshop with Cynamon began by teaching our bodies how to weave… that’s right, weaving games! This was so much fun! Cynamon played some music, and with their hands held in one long line, the children and families practiced the traditional ‘under & over’ weave, random weaving and coiling by moving their bodies in, out, over and around obstacles in the garden space. 

The children then sat in a circle around the rug to listen to Cynamon share a beautiful story about an owl who needed a hole in his nest fixed. Luckily a spider and a group of weaving worms of the South-West answered the ad in the local paper and were able to help the owl with this problem. It is amazing how incredible storytelling can be for teaching new concepts to little ones.

The next stage of the workshop was to actually start weaving and the children took to it like ducks to water! After weaving with their bodies and learning the different methods of weaving from the story they knew exactly what to do. They patiently used a cardboard loom to weave components of the owl wings, they coiled toes for another sculpture of a frog and cut out paperbark feathers to create the feathers of the owls wings and tail. Thank you Cynamon for a fun filled workshop!

We also invited the children to design what they thought our animal sculptures should look like, this is what they came up with! I don’t know if we will get that detail on the snake, but we will try!