Best selling wood projects - Amazing creations by kids at the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta

Best selling wood projects

A wonderful annual event, the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta is a two day extravaganza in South Fremantle. This year it feature5 6 open gardens, 5 open art studios, 2 open homes, and 87 stalls.
The aim of the Fiesta is to encourage people to take on more sustainable behaviours. During the Fiesta a Living Smart Speakers Tent is set up to allow different groups and individuals involved in sustainable living to share information in a more formal way over the weekend. Topics include those generally covered in the award winning “Living Smart” course – water, power, transport, waste, healthy homes, gardening for productivity and biodiversity, simply living, and keeping yourself healthy.

Many local Hulbert Street residents showcase their homes, creativity, work and sustainable lifestyles.
There are seven practising artists living in the Hulbert Street, and most have their studios open over the weekend. Other householders take part in a Living Smart Poster Project where they share what they have done in the past twelve months to make their homes and lifestyles more sustainable and what their future plans are.

The family at number 14 Hulbert Street made their front yard available to me for the weekend, where I had been asked to run woodworking stuff primarily for kids. This is always a heap of fun. A huge array of timber scraps are available to the kids - pine off cuts from a building site (non-treated), cut up plywood packing cases, cut up pine crates and other timber waste material. The kids benches were set up each with hammers and nails on hand, and the timber scraps were piled into one of those claim-shell paddling pools.  For most of the day the place hummed and clattered with the pounding of nails as droves of kids created all sorts of amazing things. Many got to also do some sawing with both tenon saws and coping saws, and some got to do wome drilling with hand drills and a brace and bit. No power tools here.
Sometimes a kid who had just arrived on the scene would say to me: "I dont know what to make." My normal response is: "Thats OK, just start hammering nails into wood and the ideas will come." Sure enough, it works every time!

Here is a bit of a gallery of some pics from Day One at the woodworking location:

As Day One drew to a close, I was staggered how much wood we had gone through! Twice as much as I had anticipated, which I had based on previous expereince. Then again, the woodworking activity for the kids had been an immensely popular aspect of the Fiesta.

Next morning early I was gathering up more timber from my stocks. I have a huge pile of pine offcuts salvaged from a building site (non-treated pine) after the roofers had finished. I normally cut these up on my docker and table saw into smaller bits of various sizes and shapes, and cut up plywood from packing cases into smaller pieces likewise. After cleaning out the remains of my pre-cut stock, I had to throw into the ute a great heap of the offcuts which had not been made smaller, and bigger pieces of ply similarly. After all, at 6:ooam on a Sunday morning it would not be neighbour friendly to fire up my machinery!

So my day started at the Fiesta before the crowd arrived with me cutting up timber by hand on site. The trusty 10 point Diston hand saw did a lot of work, including cutting up a whole pine pallet into smaller pieces. And a lot of pine stayed in large sizes as I just ran out of time. Besides, my arm needed a rest!

It wasnt long before production started again as the kids creative juices got flowing...

So what s it all about?

In keeping with the ethos of the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta, all of the timber used by the kids came from packaging materials and building waste. Stuff which normally ends up in land fill. Even the benches the kids were working are made primarily from recycled timbers. 

These kids were engaged in wonderful creative play. Unless there was a parent in the background trying to tell the kids to have a plan and interfering in the creative process, each kid came at their masterpiece from their own angle:

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  Some had a fixed idea and tried to find pieces of wood that would fit the picture in their minds. These kids often ended up using a tenon saw or coping saw to make the pieces required.
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  Some just started joining pieces together and soon something would emerge. It might morph into something else as it grew, but in the end the beaming face declared that it was completed. These constructions often just got bigger and more complex.
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  There were also joint projects between sibblings. Interesting how the older of the two or the more physically dexterous would often do the more complex hammering operations. Sometimes two projects would end up hammered together into a whole new thing!
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  Sometimes inspiration was drawn from other projects being constructed around them. But there were always a few who would push the boundaries and venture into unchartered waters...

In transforming the ideas into reality, the kids also had to confront the limitations of the materials they were working with, the limitations of their own physical ability and skill, and the challeges of how to join and hold pieces which they are hammering together. Selecting the right nail for the job, figuring out which way to direct the nail (eg through the thin piece into the thicker piece), getting the sequence right so that you could put it all together, and how to hammer the nail without bashing the whole project apart - there is a lot going on here. Many of the kids quickly worked out how to use the bench vices to their advantage for those tricky holding tasks. A little direction here and their in how to hold the hammer, hold the saw, which way to turn the hand drill, etc, how we might support this here, and away they went.  

In the end, isnt this all about developing life skills?

Aaah, the joy of working with wood...

 
Best selling wood projects

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