Tag: RedTed

Dream Catchers

Amanda Cottingham | October 5, 2011 | 12 Comments

Dream Catchers:

Dream catchers are arts and crafts of the Native American people, they are said to ward off bad dreams.

Here is a summary taken from the Dreamcatchers.org site:

The night air is filled with dreams. Good dreams are clear and know the way to the dreamer, descending through the feathers. The slightest movement of the feathers indicated the passage of yet another beautiful dream. Bad dreams, however, are confused and confusing. They cannot find their way through the web and are trapped there until the sun rises and evaporates them like the morning dew.

I have wanted to post this for a few weeks. I felt it was definitely the time this week, as I keep seeing tweets about people having crazy and very vivid dreams…even my eldest daughter has had some really unusual dreams. Last night, a giant apple was chasing me down the street!

There is a great site here, which has a tutorial on how to make a dream catcher with young children, I think this was the simplest to follow that I found.

I was really lucky as @RedTedArt, gave me lots of sites to look at and even YouTube demonstrations. I wanted to try to use the symbolism and history behind it and make something with my daughter and her friends, that they could take away with them instead of a party bag and the end of her sleepover party. This seemed perfect!

I started off with an embroidery ring, you could quite easily use other things, it wasn’t until afterwards that I thought of using fairly thick memory wire, which I think would also have given a good result.

Some beads, I found these on eBay, they are a little Trollbead like, which is why I like them. They were really inexpensive, and perfect for a craft project, but not as gorgeous as the real thing of course. If you have chance you should watch the spooky film ‘Trollhand’ on the site here, as it follows on with strange things happening in the night.

You will also need wool and/or suede strips and feathers.

I at first wrapped the suede around the bottom, covering the pin screw that you find on an embroidery hoop.

I then tied my wool, to the hoop, and wound the wool around looping it every inch or so around. The photograph above shows one full circuit of the hoop.

Next I retied the wool to the centre of one of these sections as you can see in the above photo. I then repeated the looping all the way to the centre, but you need to loop in the middle of the last circuit you have created. The easiest way to describe it is to put your thread through the last triangle sections that you have created. This gets harder as they become smaller and smaller as you get to the centre.