Giant Outdoor Woven Rainbow

To welcome spring this year, we wanted to do something big, bright and fun!

Weaving is a fantastic project to pull out with children. It's so much fun. And doing it on a giant scale makes it easy for even the littlest person to participate.

We decided to combine a few of our favourite loves in this project: our love of nature, our love of beautiful bits and pieces of fabric, yarn and roving and our love of art!

You Will Need:

• 4 branches (about 1 metre in length)
• good, solid twine (we used hemp)
• strips of fabric, torn-up t-shirts, yarn, roving...anything you can wrap in and out that will hold up outdoors

Instructions:

1. Place your branches in a star pattern. Secure the branches with twine (this is where a helping hand from a grown up comes in). You can also secure with a screw if you have a drill on hand, or use a screw and string to make it extra stable. 

2. Get your scraps of fabric, torn-up t-shirts, yarn or roving. Basically, anything that is hardy enough to handle the elements will work. Rip your fabric into long strips and get ready to weave.

You'll Also Love: Rain Art

3. Start by tying your fabric or yarn onto one of the branches, then weave over one branch and under the next, over and under, over and under...

When you run out of fabric or want to change textiles or colours, simply tie off onto a branch and start again with another colour.

You aren't limited to a rainbow. We just happened to have all the scraps in our heap to do a rainbow, but you could do it all yellow like a giant woven sun, or just make a colourful woven art piece to hang outside.

The beautiful thing about this project is that it can be hung outside and over time, it will biodegrade. Birds will use the scraps (especially the roving and yarn) to make nests and it makes a fantastic giant outdoor art piece.

Happy spring!