Beeswax candles...

The short days and long nights of winter call for some gentle, nurturing family activities at ours. We've been enjoying making our own beeswax candles to light our evening meals. The gentle light and honey scent bring warmth to our table and our home. Our children delight in watching the candles flicker and melt at different rates and how rolling the candles differently brings different results.

Rolling the candles is fun for everyone in the family, with warm hands and honey scents filling the air as we work. Even our three-year-old rolls candles with ease, after a little help to roll the wick. We like to play with different shapes, from tall and slender to short and triangular.

Sometimes we'll mix things up and cut out shapes from the beeswax to decorate with. We decorate the candles we've made or make garlands to decorate our home. Sometimes we make extra candles for gifts that'll bring a little honey warmth and light to a loved one's home.

You can find our beeswax and candle making kits here.
Find a collection of our favourite beeswax related pins here.

Celebrating the Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice blessings to you, Garden lovers! We had a rather beautiful Winter Solstice weekend. We did a little candle rolling, winter decorating, gift giving and a whole lot of celebrating and we're more than a bit grateful for the beautiful little shop full of things in our home.

You can read all about our weekend celebrations here. 

And you can find our winter range at Spiral Garden here.

Decorate your own toothbrush

Venturing out to buy the family toothbrushes at the supermarket can be a bit disheartening if you're after something without licenced characters or gender-specific colours. Racks full of pink, glittery princess toothbrushes and blue cars and transformers burst forth as you try to find a colour and character mix that fits your child's tastes... Sometimes sighing when it doesn't and when what's on offer for what should be a simple tool is... disappointing. 

Then there's all the plastic and fact that these tools should be regularly replaced. If you're a family of five, like ours, that's a whole lot of plastic thrown into landfill over a lifetime. 

We like to keep things simple by buying bamboo toothbrushes in bulk here. They're soft, lightweight fair-trade, sustainable and compostable. All things we love.

To combat the confusion of five plain wooden toothbrushes in the holder, we decorate them ourselves. Any paint will do, but our favourite, most simple way to decorate them is using our Giotto Materials Markers. They're permanent paint markers that work on absorbent materials like ceramic, stone and wood. Easy to hold, mess free and vibrant and make for a fun activity. What we love best is that we can choose our most favourite colours and patterns and every toothbrush is different. Like a little evolving art installation in our bathroom. 

You can find our Giotto Materials Markers here. 

*NB: we've not been paid to endorse the environmental toothbrush, we just thing they're a great product*

Play Food

One of the most loved corners of our home has always been the little play kitchen. We have some beautiful old wooden vegetables, a wooden tea set and some home made bits and pieces but lately we felt that it could do with a freshen up…

So when we finally received our much-wished-for Papoose felt toys order, we were thrilled to hand our children two of our most favourite sets, the pizza set and the bento set... Actually, the children rather begged, they were so taken with their beauty. What happened next amazed us…



All three children (even the almost 11 year old) played for three days straight. They were cooks, restaurant owners, busy parents… They had picnics, played shops… They covered mathematical concepts like fractions, addition, subtraction and currency and they wrote menus, bills, even restaurant reviews! It was amazing! Concentration like I've not seen in them for a long while, as their days were completely devoted to the game.



The gorgeous, sturdy food, happily has stood up to the test. Its robust fabric, expertly stitched by hand, and made from pure wool. The Papoose range is handmade in Nepal, under a fair trade scheme. It's wonderful to know that families helping to create toys, that our children play with, are provided for. All the wool is sourced in Australia and NZ, so the sheep are happy too - and so soft! These toys are so soft and beautiful to hold and amazing to play with.

Next on the list of our children's requests is the felt vegetables and fruit, for a balanced diet, of course. There's also a fair amount of eye-ing off of the felt playmats and indoor games… But we're saving them for a rainy day.

Find our Papoose range here.

Washable Watercolours

We adore playing and puddling with watercolours of any sort. Some we take travelling, or pull out when we're working on something detailed. Sometimes we like to do some wet-on-wet painting, as our eldest daughter practiced at her Steiner kindergarten. Sometimes we like to just play with colour and water and see where the medium takes us.

We were thrilled to get our hands on some Washable Watercolours this week. Made in Australia, these paints promised to be vivid and easy to use, and they didn't disappoint. With a three-year-old artist in our home, art can sometimes get messy. Especially when attentions are divided among children of varying ages. She wants to work with the same freedom her elder siblings have. While we attempt to model appropriate use of the materials, we also don't want to hinder creative expression or experimentation, so we let them all go for it.

Sometimes MESSY is an understatement.

SO we were THRILLED to hear about these new washable paints. Very quick to set up, with no mixing required, they are ready to go when placed in small jars, ice-cube trays or the like. Easy to remove from clothing, hands and most surfaces means easy clean-ups for me and more creative freedom for them.

We were also thrilled at their affordable price. No more cringing at mixed colour jars or mysterious paint-coloured finger prints around the house… And despite all their playing and puddling, very little paint was actually used.




Not to mention the beautiful colours and the way they blended. Even just three simple primary colours yielded a whole, beautiful rainbow, with ease.




Best of all, they work well for all ages. The fact that they are made in Australia is an added bonus for us, keeping the product's environmental and ethical footprint to a minimum. We started with just three colours, Red, Blue and Yellow, but a whole spectrum is available should you desire more. Right now Spiral Garden stocks Orange, Green and Purple, but more are available on request.

We're wondering what to do next with our washable watercolours. Apparently they are fantastic for colouring wood, rainbow rice and other sensory play materials and anywhere you might use large quantities of food dye. Have a look at this blog post for some more ideas.  And this one too!

You can find our Washable Watercolours here. 

Buttons...

A lazy afternoon, no plans and a big sister wanting to create something quick and fun to give her two smaller sisters...




By a stroke of luck, her Grandmother (who has impeccably good taste and a sense for these things) gave her a Sukie Button Factory and before we knew it we had a button each and spares. There was talk of gifts and friends and suddenly buttons were being counted and grouped, then divided and multiplied. Colours were discussed and new Sukie-inspired designs were created... And I do believe we have a quick and fun lazy afternoon craft project on hand for a long time to come.



Find our Sukie Button Factory here.

Colouring...

For a long time now, one of our favourite indoor activities has been colouring. We love opening a gorgeous colouring book and sharing filling the pages with colour together. Or taking a page each and working on something beautiful of our own making. Sometimes we'll even draw pictures in black outline and swap them to colour in! No matter what or how we colour, it always makes for comfortable, quiet time together.




We reach for our favourite pencils, crayons or paints and let the colours fill the page. We negotiate sharing space and favourite colours. We try different styles of colouring and talk about the shapes, shading, lines and different styles that make up the artworks that we are working with. We plan what we'll do next. We learn and develop motor skills, we explore colour... and we have fun!




Best of all, colouring is something we can all do together. It's an activity that takes as long as you like and travels well. We love colouring!

We have a beautiful range of colouring books and pencils, crayons and paints available in our store, including the beautiful Charley Harper colouring book you see above. This one has pages you can tear out, which makes colouring together super easy!

If you're interested in learning more about the benefits of colouring, there is loads of information in the links below. Happy colouring! xx


Developmental Benefits of Coloring
Why Color?
5 Reasons Why Every Adult Needs a Coloring Book
7 Benefits of Coloring
The Benefits of Colouring-In for the Elderly

Knitting

Knitting has become wildly popular in our home since the arrival of our Art Viva knitting needles to Spiral Garden. Each of our children have a pair that they knit with and particularly taken with learning the skill is our middle daughter who has only just turned seven. Although it's never too early or late to learn,around six seems to be just right for beginning, as many Waldorf/Steiner schools will agree.

Our daughter has been knitting for a little while. First on big, chunky needles, but has moved to our size 5 Art Viva needles. They are short in length, so perfect for small arms to use and small enough to be portable too. She's found the more regular size needle easier to use than a chunky needle for creating knitting projects she wants to make.

There's still a way to go before her knitting is perfect, but the leaps she's making with co-ordination and concentration are amazing. And it gives her a little something calming and quiet to do as she works with her hands. She still says the little rhyme we use to help her remember and it's so gorgeous to hear her mutter it under her breath, over and over, as she works...

"The rabbit goes through the hole,

around the tree,

back in the hole,

and away goes he..."

Do you like to knit? Or have your children learned the skill yet? 

You can find our Tasmanian handmade Art Viva knitting needles and knitting kits here. 

You'll find some helpful links on children knitting below:

The Benefits, Basics and Service Projects of Knitting for Kids  - Imagination Soup

Knitting and Intellectual Development - Millenial Child

Teaching Children How to Knit - Waldorf Handwork

Teaching Children How to Knit {VIDEO} - Martha Stewart

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modelling beeswax

One of our favourite and most popular new products has been our beautiful handmade modelling beeswax, exclusive in Australia to Spiral Garden.

Modelling beeswax is a fantastic medium for inspiring creativity. It's often used in Waldorf/Steiner education, particularly to illustrate storytelling and to engage younger children in an activity that requires and creates warmth. Beeswax is a beautiful material to hold and it has the most gorgeous, nurturing fragrance. It doesn't dry or crack, but can be re-worked over an over again as needed.

We sat down last week, on a rainy/sunny Tasmanian mid-winter's day, to spend some time connecting, chatting and playing with our beeswax colours, relishing the smell and the warmth as we moulded shapes in our hands.



To begin with, we cut our beeswax ingots into quarters with a warm, sharp knife. We only needed a small portion each for todays handwork, so we set aside the rest in their tins.



We dropped our small pieces of wax into cups of warm water for a few minutes to soften.




Then slowly, gently began to squeeze and stretch our malleable beeswax, warming our hands as we worked.





Bandicoots and turtles were the order of the day as the shapes appeared at our fingertips... Followed by an afternoon of imaginative play as modellers became wildlife carers. And such is the magic of this beautiful medium.



Handmade in Canada, using all natural ingredients and in a variety of colours, we're really proud to be selling this gorgeous product in sets of 12 or six, with beautiful reusable tins and gift bags or boxes. They make a fantastic gift, or something special for days at home, just like ours.

You can find our modelling beeswax here.

Easter in the Spiral Garden

We had such a lovely Easter break. Did you? We has lots of fun decorating eggs with our GLOB Easter Egg kits. The whole family got involved in experimenting and playing with colour and pattern to create different effects! Later we hid eggs, some filled with bulbs to plant in the garden and in new pots that sat under our Easter/Autumn tree on Easter Sunday morning.



We attended our first market at the local Steiner school, selling lots of our beautiful goodies and letting the locals know we are here.



And we took some time to recharge and reconnect with nature and wander around in the gorgeous Tasmanian bush.



What did you get up to over the Easter break?
Do you get out into nature often?

Love to you and yours. xx

Easter in Autumn :: Catching our breath...

Hello Gardener Lovers! 

It has been such a long time since we updated here. Our first busy Christmas season was just so wonderful and over in the blink of an eye and we have only just caught our breaths again. We're hoping to come and update you here, just as much as the regular emails we send out. We do hope you'll join us as we share the wonderful discoveries we make, as we pop them in our store, and our seasonal wanderings too. 

We always find the change of seasons, especially the seasons of Autumn and Spring, so inspiring. A need to renew and prepare for the seasons to come pushes us to clean and tidy up our space and our family rhythms. And observing nature's subtle changes brings beauty and inspires lots of learning and play.

It's that ever so beautifully confusing time of year again... Easter in Autumn! In our home we try and combine the two traditions, weaving harvest time and the retreat and decline towards winter with the promise and hope of new life and growth after Winter has gone. We plant winter crops and bulbs with the promise of food to sustain us and new flowers to brighten days in the Spring! So... the Easter traditions weave in beautifully, in a round-about sort of way...

This week we've set up a special part of the shop just bursting with suggestions for Easter. Watch out for lovely new bits and pieces there! Our absolute favourite is our GLOB Easter Egg Colouring Kit. You'll have loads of fun mixing colours with these beautiful natural dyes to invent a beautiful rainbow of eggs.

face painting

One of our favourite rainy day things is to get out the face paints and draw and play... This week we had a day that was too windy and rainy to do much and we had a cat, a butterfly and a mouse... and a little windswept landscape drawn on my cheek by my little one. It's so fun to hand them the paints and let them go for it. The imaginative play that ensues is amazing... Face painting can also be a beautiful way of connecting and creating some calm for a few minutes in the day.

We were very lucky that our new Giotto face paints arrived that same day. We were very keen to give them a try. They are the same product as the Lyra face paints that our customers may remember... Made from wood, in the shape of a pencil, and a mix of natural ingredients, including beeswax, they are super soft and creamy. The colours glide on with ease, blend with water, and come of with a little soapy water. What's more, they've not been tested on animals and they are reasonably priced... A perfect addition to Spiral Garden.