Finally flames!

So how have I come down from the highs of Arts Week? Has my life become a sad and empty shell now it's all over? Well no, I have ensured that I have kept busy all week and actually haven't had a spare minute to mourn it. And as a result of my keeping busy, 85 5, 6 and 7 year-olds now know the joys of felting (well if I'm being honest, 83 know the joys and 2 said it was smelly and disgusting. Ah well, can't please all of the people all of the time and all that). On the whole though they, er, only blooming loved it! I did groups of 3 and then 4 as confidence grew; they were intrigued, and toilet trips out of their classrooms and into our corridor were frequent and often delayed as they stopped for a gawp. As the week went on, many of them were pretending they hadn't already done it in an attempt to have another go. The messiness, soapiness, touchyfeeliness of it was a winning formula. And the amazing thing was how different all their felted flames were, with different colour choices and different shapes, thick ones and ones so fragilely thin that any cobweb felter would have been proud, and varying degrees of colour blending. I'm not sure the International Feltmakers Association would be impressed by the quality but every single one was in one piece by the end even if a few had a worrying hole here or there. They are going to be mounted on red paper (I hear one girl has told her mum that black would have been better; what an eye for the dramatic at such an early age!) and then stuck to the front of their topic books on the Great Fire of London. Annoyingly I forgot to take any photos of their finished articles, and it was quite full on as far as supervision was concerned, so that every time I tried to get a good group together for a photograph (ie. a group of children whose parents I knew I could ask if they were happy for me to put a photo on here), I would get into the felt making and forget about the photos. Here are the ones I did manage...