Celtic Crafting

As promised, after taking a day to be thankful, I am back with our Irish inspired crafts. As I mentioned in my last Irish post, my parents recently visited Ireland and brought us back a book of Irish crafts and activities. In the book there was a bit about The Book of Kells and it showed some lovely letters that were inspired by the ancient writings. Then there was a section that said, "Write your name the celtic way".. it seems like a weird way to say it, but it was kind of a fun idea none the less. So, we decided to go ahead and write our names the celtic way. Some letters are not in the gaelic alphabet, so we had to wing it with a few, and others were shockingly different from how we write the letter, more on that shortly. 

I happened to have some card stock hanging around, so I figured that would be perfect to use as place cards for our upcoming Irish Dinner. I used a pencil and drew the outline for each letter and gave the kids each a marker and told them to fill in the lines.

I know what you are thinking right now. That I misspelled my husband's name and instead of Preston I wrote Prerton, but in the gaelic text, the lowercase "s" looks like a lowercase "r". If you look closely you can see that the real lowercase "r" actually does look different than the "r" that is actually an "s". I did consider altering it to look like an "s" that we would use, but it felt inauthentic and ultimately, I couldn't think of a good reason to change it, it's not like he wouldn't know which seat was his and he'd be stuck sitting in another room because his place card appears to be spelled differently. (See the Gaelic Alphabet here.)

You'll never guess what we did next. Well, if you've read any of my other posts, then you might guess. We used Sculpey. Seriously, Sculpey should be sponsoring my blog with the amount of mention they get, but they do not, nor do they probably care about these silly projects that I am doing with my littles. Anyway, when we started our tour of Ireland, I swore that we would not do any shamrocks, this is not St. Patrick's Day after all. However, as it turns out, shamrocks kept turning up and then I learned that the shamrock is the national plant of Ireland. Even though shamrocks are pretty cliché, I conceded and agreed to a few shamrocks (I drew the line at leprechauns).  We found a nice green color Sculpey on sale and decided to make table decorations to be scattered on the table for our dinner. In addition to shamrocks, I made a celtic knot and Aiden made a celtic high cross.  

Completing the craft part of our learning always makes the end feel near. We usually do our crafts as we approach our celebration dinner and after we have had some time to research a bit, this way we can be inspired by our learnings when we create our crafts. The end of our Irish tour is drawing near, but we still have to stamp our passports (see the making of the passports here and other stamps here) and eat some Irish food before we can move on to another destination. 

Coming Soon: A giveaway, a potato stamp, and a hearty dinner that only the Irish could create.