springtime mandalas
A family-friendly craft from Scrappy Art Lab
Words & photos by Rachel Knudson
After long months of winter rain that have soaked the landscape, it’s exciting to venture out into the green of the Pacific Northwest, where shoots and buds and puddles await our sense of adventure. As an arts educator working with reuse and natural materials, I am attuned to seeing what is all around us and trying to find a way to build, to play, and to make with it. Children are especially good at this—adapting materials to their needs with their own creativity and spontaneity. On a walk in the neighborhood, in the park or woods, you can see how children appreciate the colors, forms, shapes and building materials that are all around them.
One of my favorite activities with kids of any age is to make a nature mandala. The word mandala comes from Sanskrit, and is usually seen as a circle of repeating symbols or patterns radiating out from the center. You can begin with collecting tidbits of various sizes from the ground: stones, petals, leaves of different shapes or colors, twigs, blossoms, found objects, pine cones, etc. Collect about 10-20 of each. Then find a patch of ground away from the path, or on top of a large flat stump or boulder.
Begin by choosing an item for the center of the space. Then make a ring around the center with four to six like items. These mark your “spokes” in the mandala wheel, and you can place more of these items within equal distance radiating outward from the center. Fill in more spokes with different tidbits. You can choose to add more rings rippling out from the center with more items to connect the spokes. The goal is symmetry and equal spacing from the center. How big can it become? Does it remind you of ripples in a pond or a spider’s web? Can you invite others to join?
As you might imagine, this can be done indoors with paper shapes or food items on a table! Then you can slowly take away the items to be eaten or used in other projects. Similarly, the natural materials outdoors can be returned to their place of discovery. This helps restore natural spaces to the way they were, to keep them undisturbed for others to enjoy, and for nature to continue its cycle of reusing materials for energy and food.
The mandala reminds us that we are passengers in this world and that our work here is more beautiful when we find a connection, share in the task, use only what we need, then leave it to flourish again.
Rachel Knudson is the founder and creative visionary of Scrappy Art Lab on Bainbridge Island, a maker space for crafts and creativity with reused and repurposed materials. Sign up for camps, workshops and after-school programs at scrappyartlab.com.
