After school club or lessons: easy batik with flour – baptism link

I was told this at school today  – you can actually use simple flour and water paste to make a batik pattern.  Use it for a great church holiday bible club idea for craft.  Write names, create patterns, and wear them!

• Get some cloth – an old white t-shirt for example.
  Mix up a paste of flour and water.  Cassava flour is used traditionally for this method.  You want it to be piping-icing consistency.
  Use a piping bag with a 4mm-ish nozzle. 

 Pipe the mush onto the cloth and allow to thoroughly dry.

 You can now dip-dye the cloth, or even just leave it to soak.  I prefer the idea of just dipping it.

 However, you can also use spray dye!  Great stuff, and looks really nice.

 Once it is all dry, peal off the flour and wash as recommended by the dye instructions.

 So how would I apply this?

 From what I understand, the word baptism comes from the Greek meaning to immerse, and was used in the dying cloth industry – I guess Lydia and the purple cloth trade might have had something to do with it.  Baptism of course was also a very ancient tradition indicating a change in direction and induction into a new life which was more Jewish than Christian, but that is another story.

 The result of using dying something is that you actually change what it is, and yet it is still recognisable.  So, I have a white t-shirt, and I dye it purple.  It is still a t-shirt, but now when I can’t find it in my drawer I might go and ask my wife if she has seen my purple t-shirt.  I won’t ask her where my white t-shirt is, nor will I ask her where my white t-shirt dyed purple is.

When a person makes a commitment to Christ they may be baptised – when a child is baptised then the God-parents take on the promises until the child is old enough to proclaim the truths for themselves (and we won’t go into the theology and argument of that here!)

 At baptism, the person isn’t actually being physically changed.  They are still that person, but they are now KNOWN differently.  Their old life has changed.  They have, as Paul says, died to it.

 Their nature is different as well –as Paul suggests, leaving the old things behind. 

Why not batik a cross or a fish symbol onto t-shirts.  It’s also something perhaps you could do at a confirmation group or baptism preparation class?

Find out the professional way of doing flour batik…

Shortlink: http://wp.me/pDlJe-4v

Craft in class or church for bible verses about hearing and ears

Just  saw this one on Mr Maker (you can sometimes catch up on it via BBC iPlayer.)

Use cotton buds to make the pictures.  They make great bones too, but perhaps you could use them to make outline pictures and shapes.  Just lie the cotton buds end to end, cut some shorter and leave others longer.  Glue them down to (darker) coloured paper.

As you are creating these crafts, make sure that you are talking to the children about what the bible passage means, and ask them how their picture is showing that.  You can do this as a class activity perhaps if you work in school.

If you can still get access to an overhead projector, why not glue or sellotape cotton buds to a piece of transparency to make the pictures for the story.

If you want to go digital, then make the pictures at home, take a photo and put it on a memory stick to take into school.  If you want to get really clever, mount the camera on a tripod so that it doesn’t move, add one cotton bud to the picture, take a photo, take another picture, add another cotton bud and so on until you have the whole picture.  Then go to your powerpoint program, and overlay each picture with a delay between each one of about half a second.  The picture will build up in front of their eyes as an animation.

Here are some 2 sample passages that might get you started.

• The deaf shall hear…
• Those who have ears, let them hear

Just put the word ‘hear’ ‘ear’ or ‘ears’ into biblegateway.com’s search engine for keywords and see what comes up!

Happy ear budding!