Tree of Life Weavings

Sometimes new projects flop. They take too long or not long enough, they are not engaging or they don't teach the right lessons. But then there are projects that are absolutely perfect and I fall completely in LOVE with them. The fifth grade students made these incredible "tree of life" weavings last semester, and I just now got around to figuring out how to display them. They were going to go in our public library, but then the library roof caved in. Bad news. But they look pretty good displayed in our hallway too. This project was inspired by some other tree weaving projects I found floating around on pinterest, here and here. I put the two ideas together and this beauty was born.

We began by looking a tree of life images from around the world. Then we painted a heavy duty paper plate with metallic acrylic paint. You don't want the flimsy cheap plates for this, splurge for the good stuff. I created a template with notches cut in the plate for the string to be wrapped, and the students used my plate to mark and cut their notches in the same places. We taped thick yarn to the back and began wrapping front to back and around until all the notches were filled. We gathered the center of the yarn together with another color to create a trunk for the tree. Then we used multicolored yarn for the weaving. Cassie Stephens has a much better tutorial for how to do the step-by-step on this project. I had the students snip and fray some of their 'roots' and add beads if they wanted. They look so stunning when they are finished!