Sunday, October 20, 2013

Arch # 12


The Butternut Squash Arch 2009

The butternut is a vegetable that lends itself well to creative arch building. It has length and hardness and it's tapered, which all helps towards making something structural with it. 

At all our DSWAC festival events in Canada we built things with kids, often with unusual building material. 

Maybe the butternut squash 'kid's project' at the festival in Grand Valley (where the grown ups built a dry stone black house) was the most unusual. To see this event go to...2009-canadian-dry-stone-wall-festival

I've always maintained that children should be encouraged to attend these events and should be part what we are doing to promote happy dry stone walling here in Canada. It's not all just about professional advancement and crawling through conventional hoops .




Abigail and her friend crawl through the 'Arch de Butternut', carefully avoiding being squashed.