The Fairyland Trust attended the wonderful 3 Foot Festival at Hylands Park, Chelmsford in June. The crew loaded up the vans and headed down to Essex on the 23rd, ready for three days of crown-making drop in sessions with pre-school children and their families. The drive offered up some apocalyptic thunderstorms and even a broken fan belt, but the crew and kit arrived safely. After some shower-dodging, the tents were up and ready to be decorated with native tree leaves and the Fairyland Trust information and photos to help teach families about magical times of the year, wildflower species and trees.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were beautifully sunny and were a blur of meeting and greeting excited children, measuring heads for willow withie crown bases and ushering families into the medieval tents ready to create crowns. Once seated in the first tent, children and their well-behaved adults were introduced to the Fairy Calendar and given some leaves to add to their crown base. With each leaf, the Crown Makers explained the folklore associated with the native tree and a little about the wildlife that inhabited the trees. A few tree species later, the children were pointed through the secret tunnel to the adjoining tent.
The second tent was filled with photos of Midsummer wildflowers, and another of the Crown Makers showed the families how to create pretend flowers (we left the real ones to the bees and butterflies!) out of brightly coloured tissue. Each flower also had associated folklore and some information about the creatures, magical and non-magical, that visited them for food. Crowns were admired in the fairy mirror and met with giant grins from their reflections. Some children were lucky enough to have wildflowers in their garden or near to where they lived so already knew a few species, others learnt a lot and wore their crowns with pride as they left the tent, knowing a more plant species and which creatures favoured them.
We sold Wildflower Seed Wands, recruited bakers and fundraisers for the Fairy Meadow Fund (http://www.fairylandtrust.org/fairy-meadow-fund.html for more info) and chatted to a lot of lovely folk about the work the Fairyland Trust does as a conservation charity for little people. We also met a couple of friends, a Pygmy Shrew that got under our feet and a Puss Moth caterpillar that munched away on our willow leaves whilst we made crowns! All in all, a pretty fantastic festival!
No comments:
Post a Comment