30 Days Wild Day 3: Making nature creatures

Today I went for a quick random act of wildness as it was first day back at school, nerves were a little wobbly (them not me. Maybe me a little bit), plus I had unfinished work coming out of my ears to catch up on. I chose an outdoor arty/crafty activity; making nature creatures.

I’ll be honest, I’m not the world’s best crafty mum. I actually don’t really like it that much. All the faff and all the mess for ten minutes of actual art. I’d rather be out and about doing stuff and clambering about exploring with my kids. I leave the craft up to school. But making nature creatures seemed like an easy and fun crafty activity and I want to do more stuff like this if it genuinely is easy, so we gave it a go.

My eldest and I went out in the garden after school and collected leaves of all shapes, sizes and colours plus a few flowers like daisies and pretty weeds, and some sticks and old beech nut shells, moss. Whatever we came across that looked interesting.

I was actually really surprised how much variety there was – we found leaves of all colours, yellow, green, red and brown. Plus lots of colours from the flowers – whites and purples and yellows. My son also added in some of the shells we’ve found over the years too which I thought was very clever.

We laid all our findings out on some white paper and added in a couple of boggly eyes, then began making a few people plus a hedgehog and beach-inspired crab!

The Woodland Trust has lots more ideas here should you want to have a go. I’d definitely do this again as it was minimal mess and fuss, got us outside for half an hour and exploring the garden in a different way. It was also really funny and my sons enjoyed it a lot, laughing at the silly creature we made. I thought they might be a bit whiny, being just before bedtime, but they loved it and have saved the collections for another day. Win!

All the natural materials we found

Making the masterpieces

Our seaside-inspired crab made from shells

Leafy hedgehog

A rather tubby leaf man (or lady)