Mustard Seed Medicine layout

Whew! Six months later, I've finally finished up the Mustard Seed Medicine story. First, here it is:

Particulars:

The story is made from wood and felt. The figures are cut from 3/4 inch pine board, and the Buddha's house is cut from a 3/4 inch by 3/4 inch piece of oak. Painted with water colors, wood-burned features, and Mod Podge sealer.

The houses are just two felt rectangles with the top one having a door-shaped rectangle cut out, and then the two layers stitched all around. (They likely could have been glued for a no-sew option, but I like the look of sewing.) I worked with the house design a lot, but it seemed as if the more clever and engaging I tried to get with the house designs, the more distracting they were from the characters and the flow of the story. Simple and repetitive was definitely the way to go. Still, something nice about these houses is that you can tuck the figures into them, so in that house in the upper left, you can keep the green neighbor in the house until the mother comes to ask for the mustard seed, and then have the neighbor come out the door to talk.

This story is written up beautifully on the Spirit Play training CD, and this layout works well with that text.

Tools and Supplies:

This presentation was pretty tools-intensive. I used a scroll saw, a Dremel tool, a sewing machine, sandpaper and a big set of watercolor paints. Supplies, however, were cheap. The full pine board was $9 for, I think, 10" by 8'? The 3/4" oak piece was 7' long and was about $7. I used probably 20% of both of the quantities of wood, so let's call that $3. The felt was $5/yard, and the quantities I needed to buy in order to get the big white shape meant 1 1/2 yards total of fabric. I used my handy-dandy 40% off coupon from JoAnn's, so that was maybe $3.50.

If you didn't have tools available to you, you could glue or hand-stitch the houses, use wooden peg people (simply painted in muted colors would be nice), and use long, thin felt pieces for Buddha's open-sided house. That would keep the story still under $10.

I'm back! Baby boy and buying felt

Yay! I'm back to church after my summer furlough and maternity leave.

This was shortly before baby boy was born:

And here's baby boy a few days ago:

There. So now you are caught up! I've been back to work for two Sundays and was cheered to find that the Spirit Play classroom was clipping along with a schedule and activities that were working nicely. I hope this is the year that we can hold a retraining. My great hope is to present it to teachers and parents alike, pitching it as a classroom and homeschool/home worship method.

Meanwhile, I made use of a few JoAnns coupons and stocked up on underlay felt.

 This is something I have learned in the past year, to have on hand single yards of 72" recycled plastic felt--brand Ecofelt--in various colors, which JoAnn's sells for $4.99 a yard. Each yard yields 2 full 36" circular underlays, with ample scraps for other story elements. The neutral colors turned out to be the most useful, though the purple and dark blue are nice, too. Some of the bright colors that we thought we would end up color-coding with the rainbow Promise stories were just to hard to look at under the fluorescent lights of the classrooms, so we're moving away from that.