Nativity

Last week I went on a magic carpet ride to take part in Christine’s Art for Advent project.

That was a photographic project and this week I wanted to try something handmade that didn’t rely on digital effects. It occurred to me that I don’t have any nativity scene or crib in my house, and I decided to make a small one using only things I could find in my house or garden.

Well it was a brave attempt but unfortunately it ended up looking a bit like a plum pudding! Never mind, it was interesting to try looking at things in the house in a new way. I’m not (at the moment) the sort of person who has proper art supplies lying around the place, so I had to do quite a lot of improvising, which I’ll explain below. Here’s the nativity scene.

First of all I scrounged around some of last year’s Christmas cards and cut out the manger scene (which is about two inches across) and the star. I needed something to put them on and used an old CD. On that, I glued some crumpled brown tissue paper (hence the plum pudding effect – I didn’t think of that or I would have used white paper).

Then I glued on the little manger and the star. I really needed some matt varnish but didn’t have any, so in a moment of either madness or inspiration, I sprayed the thing with hairspray. That worked quite well to mould the card and tissue paper together. Then I got some rosemary sprigs from the garden and glued them on for a roof. And finally, to give the whole thing some cohesion, I got some of that ’70s glitter dust for your hair (KNEW it would come in useful one day!) and dusted that all over. Yes, OK, I know it looks like icing sugar, but my intentions were good.

So there you have it, a rather wonky nativity scene, that smells of a mixture of hairspray and rosemary. I’m kinda proud of it in a strange sort of way.