I recently went away for the weekend with a friend of mine, we headed of to Rye and also went down to the seaside at Dungeness. You feel like you might fall of the edge of the country and its all a bit apocalyptic but we spent an hour wandering along the coastline foraging for shells and other beautiful items.
You can see what I collected below…
When talking about foraging in order to be creative, or to design a creative project. If someone said to you that that process would allow for attention restoration and mind wandering, what would you say? There are four stages to Kaplans theory of attention restoration theory and as I walk through the steps of making this wreath, I’ll talk through the four points as well.
1: Improved focus and mental clarity
To put it simply, you have a tricky morning at work, you head out to the park at lunchtime to eat a sandwich and on return find that your mind has worked through some of the tricky bits and a solution becomes apparent.
When wandering along that coastline looking for shells, where was my attention, what was I thinking about? I did think to myself at the time, its amazing that my brain is able to skim along all these stones and pick out ones that I like the look of.
2: Mental fatigue recovery
I think it was the release I needed that afternoon, allowing my brain to empty of thought and enjoy the process of spotting treasures and this is the basis of Attentention restoration theory. That, by allowing your body/brain time in nature can help with mental fatigue and concentration.
It also helped that my friend Emma has a wealth of knowledge about shells and such like so she was the perfect companion.
As a base for the wreath, I reused my Christmas wreath as it had dried out and was just the right colour. If you haven’t already, do you check out my Spring wreath blog where I repurposed the rest of the Christmas wreath.
3: Gentle encouragement or curiosity
The curiosity of what I was spying out on the walk meant that the normal noise one has going round in the brain was quietened as I listened to Emma introduce me to hag stones, you can read about their meaning in this blog post from Simple things.
There were wonderful pieces of driftwood and moss coloured sticks (the mustard yellow was very on trend) chunks of crabs shells with amazing texture on them. All these were found on the beach so they got glued onto the wreath. Other shells included whelks and cockles.
The yellow lichen is called ‘sunburst’ and I found this from a helpful app called Seek. You can download it onto your phone, just point with your camera at whatever your looking at and then it should tell you.
4: Contemplation and rejuvenation.
I think after a time in nature you can come back to life again feeling restored and inspired? Creating something that was not a normal style for felt quite strange. It was a combination of feeling like I was back at primary school and having to push myself to create.
The texture and colour on the shells was amazing and I wanted to capture some of that by gluing some in showing their inside and some with the outside texture showing. I found placing glue on the edge/rim of the shell and then popping it into place a useful way to do it.
It was lovely to have more than just shells to play with, as when you are creating a gift bouquet. Using a single type of flower can create quite a one dimensional feel. Having different shapes and textures adds to the viewers enjoyment.
I found small amounts of seaweed and lichen that had dried and were the perfect colour for the wreath, so I broke them into smaller sections and glued them onto the wreath.
You can see the final wreath on my instagram page, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the process and look forward to our next project.
Grace x