Music Wall (R.I.P. Music Tree)

Last year I wrote a little post about our music tree in the back yard. The kids had a lot of fun with it, but when it got to the rainy season here I brought in the musical bits, and for several months, the tree sat musicless and leafless in a soupy mud pit.
Fast forward a few months and the rain has stopped being so relentless, but when I went out to reinstate the music tree, I found that this dinky little apple tree that had never given us more than about five apples in total, was absolutely covered in tiny apples this year! Whoooo! I didn't want to put all the chimes back on and have the kids smacking all the growing apples with wooden spoons though. Dilema!
A short while ago Jenny posted about "music walls" and "banging posts" on her blog "Let the Children Play". She gave some great links to a bunch of different ones that people had made. You can find that post here.

Our landlord is in negotiations with our neighbour to replace a rotting fence between us, so there is no problem bashing a ton of nails into it over the summer. Long story short... here's our music wall... Broken xylophone, the old wind chimes and tambourines from the music tree, some bowls, pans and a load of sticks (wooden spoons or beads on wire sticks), plus a couple of the wire shelves from an old refridgerator that a neighbour was disposing of. Lots of clangy bangy goodness. All of the hardware used to fix stuff to the fence was lurking in the garage, so this didn't cost us anything to do. I honestly have no idea what these weird things that the chimes are hanging from are meant to be for. Something to do with curtains maybe? To hang the wooden spoons up I used a bit of electrical tape to stick a length of electrical tie in a loop from the end.
I actually like this much better than the tree, but I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's having it all laid out like a giant instrument, rather than the randomness of the tree, but then I did like the randomness of the tree. Maybe it's just that it's something new. I'm always keen for change afterall. Here's the littlest lass to give you a demo...

Thanks Jenny for pointing us to all that lovely inspiration in your blog post!

Sorry to any of you that subscribe to Filth Wizardry and got a couple of non existant posts in your RSS feed yesterday. Blame my trigger happy keyboard short cutting while I was trying to consolidate all the unpublished posts I have lurking back here! Ooops, sorry! As the title of the non existent post said "Mmm, I love people" and I do, but all of that has been crammed into another post with some other stuff now, so be patient :) My mate is on the verge of labour with her fourth baby, so I will have a house full of children while she's in the hospital. My cunning plan is to hang them upsidedown from the ceiling like bats to fit them all in the bedroom overnight ;) Maybe a more reasonable solution would be to build a massive den in the livingroom.