Catching A Dream

With everything we had planted till thus far peacefully stretching their roots and leaves, the time had come to add some more personal touches to the garden. A bit of raking here, weeding away the latest batch of tiny intruders that seem to pop up daily and fantasizing about what our garden will look like by March 2011, can only take you as far.

We decided to make our own giant dreamcatcher from some of the wood that we had recently machete'd off to allow some more sun into our overgrown garden. We started by taking some smaller branches that hadn't dried out yet and twisting two together at a time into an arc-shape, then securing them with string into this position. We kept adding on twisted-branch arcs until we had a big full circle.




Once the outline was ready, we carefully wound cotton-wool around some areas to decorate it. We decided afterwards, that it would have been better to do the net first and then do this, seeing as the points where the fastens onto the frame will then run over the other wool, making it a bit rough - but, this was fine for now.

I started with the netting, but buggered it up after about 20 minutes and had to restart.. The joys of trial and error! This time I followed a circular netting pattern using one single long piece of wool. Seeing as we wanted to suspend a rose-quartz crystal (the size of a fist!) right in the centre of the net, I went over every part three times (Yes, it took long - better way would have been to take three threads of the same length and do them simultaneously - noted for future projects!) to hold up the crystal's weight. After the net was done, it was just a matter of decoration. Each of us three added our own touches to the massive web, ranging from feathers, old bracelets, smaller stones and crystals to our centre-piece.

The end product was even more beautiful than we had imagined. It found its place in our garden with ease, joining our other smaller dreamcatchers, as it was hung from a strong hemp rope. Whether it is, as many of the Native-Americans believed, catching bad energy passing through it's web or simply colouring in our garden, we were one more step closer to our own backyard-paradise.

Although this photo doesn't do it's size much justice,
the circle has a diameter of about 1 meter (+/-  3.28 feet)