Sharing and developing Ideas... and a spot of guerilla gardening

My friend Lily, who is incredibly creative, kindly shared a post on her blog last week about shrunken apple faces: "gurning in the natural world", or "from scrumping to scary". See her post here: http://kindlingplayandtraining.blogspot.com 

Its a delightful activity for any age: sweet smelling, juicy, providing free food and a nice way of introducing tool use to children in the form of potato peelers. The end results are amazing and remarkably varied! We then talked about developing it for a Wacky Woods showcase event I'm doing for Halloween at the wonderful new Treacle Market in Macclesfield: http://www.treaclemacclesfield.co.uk by adding leafy capes and hats and creating wonderful characters that could be used to enhance some spooky story telling/role play.

I started to make my own shrunken apple face and to play around with it. It looked gruesome enough but there was something missing, it looked skeletal but not enough: I thought it needed some "garnishing". 
Ruminating, late at night, as usual, I remembered a wonderful pair of ladies I encountered at the first Just So Festival  http://www.justsofestival.org.uk/this summer.
The beautifully and extravagently dressed  Lady Gardeners were handing out little seed bombs: perfectly formed little balls of clay filled with wild flower seed that you could toss anywhere in anticipation of a future wild flower garden springing up. Guerrilla gardening! And that's when it came to me: how to garnish my shrunken apple face and apply a bit of guerrilla gardening of my own... so...

My shrunken apple head (who is affectionately know as Erik) now has spectacular ear hair in the form of aquilegia seed pods, parsley seed hair, bushy eyebrows of lavender seed and of course contains his own inner core of apple seeds.

Erik newly created before slow drying.

I think the possiblities are endless for adding seeds to various parts of his upper anatomy, and after Halloween is been and gone, I will carefully lob him into the greatoutdoors and wait to see what happens next year... Or I could introduce some spirituality and place him carefully in the ground on All Hallows Day and pray for the departed, and the rebirth of the spring to come.

Erik as he begins to dry out and shrink

I strongly suspect that someone reading this may develop the idea further... do let me know.