The music tree

Just a wee post. not the usual squillions of pictures. I just wanted to post about this quickly because it's given a lot of joy to my kids and their friends.

My older daughter always oooha and ahhhs when we pass a house near us that has a load of wind chimes on the porch. She asked last week if we could make some wind chimes, so awesome husband hacksawed up some copper pipe, drilled a couple of holes in each tube and hung them up in the kitchen for a while for the kids to bash with xylophone sticks (you can see it strung between the cooker and the door on the terrifying scarecrow post)

Well, on the weekend we found two proper wind chimes that were quite old and grotty for cheap in a thrift store, so we brought them home and separated them into individual chimes. I'm not a big fan of metal wind chimes to be honest, especially with the wind we sometimes get around here. I would worry about it being noise polution of the clangiest incesant variety for our three neighbours, so separating the chimes out meant that when we hung them outside they wouldn't make a din in the wind, but the kids could interact with them to make tunes themselves.

We hung them all up along with a few metal dessert dishes and a couple of elderly tambourines on a little apple tree at the corner of our house. They are tied with string to clips I pulled off a dollar store hanger for drying clothes, so we can move them around or bring them inside if we want. Now the kids can play the music tree with their freinds and if they have wooden spoons to play it with then the sound is lovely and muted and not quite so clangy as metal on metal, so the neighbours aren't going to emmigrate or throw bricks over the fence at us. I have quite a few wooden spoons in the craft bin, so the kids were able to make collaborative noise with their freinds this week, which was really quite funny, watching them choose songs to sing and then making very careful and utterly tuneless noise to go along with the already hilariously out of tune preschooler choir attempt.
I think I'm going to tie up a clothes line from the tree to the fence and see if the kids can arrange the chimes on the line in order of pitch. That could be interesting.