Sparkle Crafts

Sparkle Crafts: Lashing Sticks

Martin and Sylvia are inspired to create with "Sticks" in this week’s At Home with Martin and Sylvia, from a fairy house to furniture to Momma’s lunch on a stick!

Well, so are we! To get prepared for making all manner of objects out of sticks, we decided to start learning lashing on a small scale by building a little fairy house from oak twigs and sock yarn.

Now we’re thinking about taking this to the next level by using big branches and rope to build a human house in the backyard, but here’s what we started with:

What you need:

• twigs or small branches
• yarn with at least two plies (plied yarn is stronger and less likely to break than single ply)

We started by making a rectangle for a roof, joining each corner with the square lashing technique. We found this tutorial to be very helpful: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Square-Lashing-and-Round-Lashing/

Once you have your rectangle roof, you’ll want a bit of bracing, which also serves as something for your roof cover to sit on. For this, a different technique was used, called diagonal lashing. Another good tutorial is here & you can see the frame we were aiming for here. It’s a little fiddly on such a small scale, but we were really pleased with the resulting shape.

Once the roof piece was complete, we made two x’s with diagonal lashing and then used square lashing to attach to the top two corners of each short side of the rectangle. These are the supports to hold the structure up.

It’s simple and sweet, especially with a fennel frond roof covering.

We can’t wait to go on a hunt for bigger material and build some larger structures. For human size, we would have a support on the back side, as well, and be a tad more precise with our measurements. The fairies, however, find our somewhat asymmetrical assemblage to be perfect for garden gatherings and to take cover from a spring shower.

Happy building!