Making a Silk Tepee

Tepees are great fun for outdoor and indoor play!

As we've found out, they also can be an abode for curious pets....

If you are studying Native Americans this year, you can work on creating a more authentic tepee and and incorporate this into lessons.

Learning how to do knots and lashing to create a sturdy frame is wonderful, too!  Look at scouting manuals for help.

Maybe sleep in it overnight?

Play clips, yarn, twine and clothespins are helpful if you want to reuse the silks or fabric.

Rainbow Silks in our Etsy shop.

Wood play clips from this Etsy shop, and this one.

Birthday Rings

We have always wanted a birthday ring that we could also use on our nature table for festival celebrations, including Advent.  One of our local Waldorf dads handcrafts these beautiful rings and sells them in his Etsy shop.  We asked for one unfinished so that we could paint it ourselves!

The wood is sycamore which is already so beautiful on its own.  We tested out how it would look on our kitchen table and in our nature table area.

Wilson and Mommy decided to paint rainbow colors using our Stockmar watercolors.  Then, we polished them with natural beeswax polish. 

Now, the birthday ring is ready!  It's so beautiful, we have it out in the kitchen right now.  When the new baby is born around October, we will use it to celebrate the birth with a candle.

Math Dice

We love our math dice!  Thank you very much to Jen DiMonte of the Ancient Hearth blog and Etsy shop.  She makes beautiful wood math dice, perfect for games, computations and more.

The kids enjoy using the all the dice together, including the one with Roman numerals!

One of their favorite things to do is to test Mommy or older brother and sister.

We keep our math dice in one of our naturally dyed silk velvet pouches so that they stay protected when we put them away or take them with us on trips.

Count on Nature

At Syrendell, we are surrounded by the artistry of nature. The bounty of the garden vegetables glisten in the sun like jewels, the beauty of flowers smile like ballerinas on a stage, and even the humble ivy twist about like Celtic knots in the shade of trees. With the branches of felled trees, among abandoned heaps of clippings, in a quiet corner of the yard, one may think the artistry of nature had run its course. But no!

Revived by Syrendell, the tree branch is awakened and revitalized as homelearning counting and imagination blocks!



Daddy cut the branches, sanded their edges and rough parts of the bark, and some sets he finished with beeswax, others without (he seems to prefer to leave them unfinished to see the natural patina of the wood). In sets of twelve, with diameters averaging one and a half inches, with lengths between one inch to about three inches, they make excellent counting blocks, just the perfect number to learn basic operations. Mommy dyed a circle-shaped muslin fabric with onion skins, Joey sewed the edges, and Ricky and Wilson did a simple single crochet as a tie, and voila! A handy pouch to carry the wood blocks in. And with some imagination, both the fabric and the tie can serve so many other uses.

Nature continues to inspire us, feed us, protect us. We honor it by sustaining its vital force through the appreciation of all it can offer us and teach us.

Our Play Farm

Joey sewed a playmat earlier this year. She crocheted some flowers, needlefelted a river, felted some rocks by throwing blobs of wool fiber into the washing machine and dryer, and sewed the entire mat out of our old clothes.

Recently, a few animal friends decided to join us on the play mat. We purchased some moveable wood fence pieces on Etsy, and a farm was born!

Some of the farm animals are sewed out of felt, some are made out of wood, while others are crocheted, knitted or needlefelted. The goose came from downinthemeadow Etsy shop. Some sheep and a kitty are on their way to us from mama4earth Etsy shop. The lovely wood mushroom was made by Carle's husband. The puzzle tree came from Etsy, and the other tree is a cut piece of wood from Daddy with wool roving on top. The horse and pig came from Steiner College Bookstore. The rest were made at home by Mommy and Daddy.

This week, Wilson and Mommy were retelling the story of The Four Friends using the play farm. Then, the fences ended up becoming all sorts of imaginative creatures on their own. What fun!