Eden Tree

Yesterday I was privileged to be part of the start of something new and exciting.  My church has been blessed to be asked to put together an Open the Book team at our local primary school.  Open the book is a scheme where teams of volunteers from local churches go into primary schools to give weekly storytelling assemblies based on the Lion Storyteller Bible.

Our local primary school approached me early this year to ask if we would be interested and I have been able to put a team together and yesterday was our first ever session in school for open the Book.

If there is one thing Open the Book is NOT about it's acting.  It is definitely NOT acting, it is interactive story telling with props and costumes.  Because we are reading not acting we want as much visual impact as possible and so a lot of effort will be going into the props.

Yesterday we did the story of creation and tomorrow we will be doing the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.  Today I worked on making our tree.  I used two sheets of 5mm thick foam board in A1 size, which is 594mm by 841mm or in inches, 23.39 by 33.11

On one I drew a rough shape of a tree trunk and on the other a rough shape of a tree top. I then more or less ignored what I had drawn when it came to cutting out with a craft knife, but hey it gave me an idea of where to go!  For the trunk, I cut one side first, then flipped the piece I had cut out and placed it on the other side, then cut around that.

 Then I cut the trunk straight down the middle, because I am going to be angling the two pieces in order to make them stand up.

Then I took them up to my craft room and painted.  I am not a neat and pretty painter but that's OK in this case.  I painted a coat of light green roughly onto the tree top, then stippled a darker green in splotches all over it.

The trunk I just painted roughly, all over in burnt umber.

Tomorrow, when the pieces are dry I will put duct tape up the back of where the two trunk pieces meet, and stand them up at an angle to each other.  I will cut a slot in matching places at the top of each trunk and make matching slots in the tree.  Don't know if I will get the photos of that part of the process up tomorrow as I have a busy afternoon, but I will get them up on Friday.