...Alternatively.....

Then again, don't you thing these are so much more interesting? These are thanks to my good buddy Gill who recommend this little book to me at Christmas time. Thanks Gill!

Another sample

Okay, the sampling continues. Tried to make these two different pieces as if I was two different children. The plastic spacers will be longer in real life so the pieces won't butt up to each other quite so much. I could make it more coherent by giving the kids more instructions but they are only 12 after all and we're not entering for the Turner prize....this year. Obviously this sample has yet to have the holes 'strung' with stitching.

Cacophany or harmony?

It's a long time since I put pen to sketchbook for design purposes but I had to sort out a few things in my head since being told that what my school children are actually working on is a collaborative project destined for public display. I'm going to join their A4 sized pieces of work together in long strips. The first drawing shows that if we let them do their own creative thing it will look just like what it says on the tin - a whole lot of different creative things joined together.











On the other hand, if I set them parameters and say that
everyone has to use their piece portrait way up and take their shapes from the top to the bottom in some kind of fluid way you can see that a line of sorts emerges. All these pieces will be different on the front but it we make them all similar on the back (sunshine yellow I'm thinking) the yellow cut out fold overs revealed in that line will give the piece even more harmony.

I hate to put any kind of brake on their creativity and I REALLY hate to see an art class produce all the same thing. I will encourage individuality in the parts where that's possible. If it wasn't required all to hang together, obviously I wouldn't be doing this at all.






If we are super smart, we could have linking pieces top and bottom so the line appears to run up one panel and down the next. Whatch think?

String section

Here's my opening prelude for the kids next piece. I thought they could turn their minds to the characteristics of musical instruments. I was going to have a brain storming session, asking them to image I am a creature from another planet (which I am to them) and they have to describe the look of musical instruments to me in one word only. Like - curves, holes, keys, strings.....here endeth my personal knowledge of musical instruments........oh no........comb and paper.

Suppose we started with strings which obviously is the one that leads us most seamlessly into stitching. They could pick a shape from the Kandinskyesque drawings, half cut it out of their coloured double sided craft vilene, bend the shape back to revereal the reverse side and create a bit of texture then string it with a bit of perle cotton or whatever.

I was trying to impress upon them that in design repetition can be good but exact repetition can be boring so maybe the challenge should be to string each hole in a slightly different way. I plonked my sample here on top of my original drawing to photograph it and really like the effect so maybe they could back their piece with a bit of drawing as a finishing touch.

Half way through this project the school have dropped the bombshell that the result is to be a harmonious amalgam of finished pieces on permanent display in their memorial music suite. So no pressure then. Oh, and did I mention we only have three weeks to go? That would be 9 hours in real time. Was lying in bed this morning thinking about how to join the pieces speedily and effortlessly and came up with the idea of the plastic clothes tags I use for jewellery sometimes. Not fabulously beautifully but they can be dyed to make them less offensive. They are certainly fast and might prevent me from becoming furious.

Kanfabulousodinskytastic!

Staying in the moment

I've been reading a bit of Eastern philosophy and today I'm going to impart my wisdom to my 12 year old novices. Lucky novices! I'm going to introduce them to the idea of conscious thinking and intuition. The brain that goes '..imagine her saying that to me...look at the state of him....should I buy those boots....wonder what's for tea...' while you lock yourself out the house and crash the car because you're not paying attention. This is undoubtedly the brain that was responsible for the mess I have just made of my breakfast. I have the same breakfast every morning in life - porridge - made to the same recipe and miked for the same length of time. So how come this morning it looks like pig's swill? Because imagine her saying that to me! Look at the state of him....................

Kandinsky eat your heart out!

Moving swiftly along to the next stage with the kids, we are going to do some drawing to music. We only have the funding for this project because it is cross curricular so we must be seen to be bringing the two art forms together. Having said that, self expression can be rather difficult to prize out of twelve year olds as I am discovering. Particularly if you want them to express something different from that which their neighbour is expressing. It takes guts and lots of hard life lessons to become an individual. So, recipe for instant twelve year old individuality required.

No problem! I'll just take on board the lessons in loosing up that I learnt from Big Draw and furnish them all with some wallpaper lining, a cane and a felt pen. Gave it a try tonight with some musically driven wiggly squiggles. Easy, man! Then, hopefully, they can spend a happy and peaceful remainder of the period isolating and adding colour to the areas of their choice, a la Kandinsky, ready to be reinterpreted in stitch. This is the plan so far...

Faster! faster!

Just back from day one of block making and paper printing/painting with school kids. Went well eventually - but they are as slow as a week in the jail and don't really appreciate being huckled. But huckled they were and eventually developed a sense of urgency fostered by me shouting at them 'No thinking! Anyone found thinking is in serious trouble'. Ahhhh, I was born to be an educator!

Playing at Project Catwalk

This is what I plan to do with the kiddiewinkies on Tuesday. We're going to play at being fabric designers. I'm going to have them make a string block and a foam block of their own design and build up pattern on cheap lining fabric using disperse dyes and acrylic. I quite like these. I'm feeling better about the project now.

Pay attention at the back!

Made my initial art/music presentation to the kids at school today. Was sitting in reception waiting to go up in the lift when- horror of horrors- I realised had forgotten the piece of work I was going to talk to them about. I had brought examples of my own work in order to do my introduction as an artists chat so I did have something to show them. Just had to wing it and ask them to image the other piece as I described it. Seemed to work. Even children lolling on one elbow, chewing their ties, or having a quick heads down catnap on the desk showed a flicker of passing interest. I'm sure I can fan this into flames of enthusiasm given time, maximum effort and buckets of adrenaline. Several reluctantly confessed to having been the sewing route before so this is not going to be totally new ground for them, which is a relief.....I think. My memories of school sewing are not what you would call inspirational. Hope I'll mange to give them something to remember, in a good way.

Art from Music

Here's another sample for my art from music class. Only it's not - from music. It's from thinking ohmigod, what am I going to do with these children? It's disperse dyeing and reverse applique and needle painting and bondaweb painting....in other words, a whole lot of techniques flung at a piece of Vilene. Somewhere in my mind I can here my college tutor muttering less is more but she's overpowered by the can I keep 40 kids going for six weeks vibe. My playing session had given me a bit more confidence. Think plenty of ammunition is key at the moment. Refinement can come later.

Seaglass rocks

I'm not so keen on evening workshops. The energy levels seem to be lower. Or maybe that would just be my energy levels! Thought at first it was going to be a no show but eventually 12 people arrived and produced some lovely stuff, as always. Tables were grotty and I forgot my cloth so I tried a little photo cropping.

Craft Sanity

Here's another fav podcast you should check out. This lady is a working mum who makes time to interview the weird and wonderful in the world of craft. I'm sure the best podcasters of today, of which Jennifer is one, are going to be the superstars of tommorrow. Isn't exciting to be in at the birth of this revolution?

I will be getting off my butt and doing something shortly - other than knitting socks - I promise. Seaglass workshop tonight and big schools workshop kicking off on Thursday.

What's on the pins.

I'm currently challenging myself with Lucy Neatby's Fiesta Feet. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy! What did I ever do to you?

By the way, any other Lime 'n Violet podcast listeners out there? I discovered them recently and just love them to bits. They get side tracked so often that sometimes there is very little chat about knitting in their hour long show. Sometimes I struggle with their accents (as I'm sure they would with mine) and am not entirely sure what they are saying. The reason I love them so is that they cackle, guffaw, hoot, shriek and belly laugh their way through. I sit there with the cordless headphones on grinning like a Jack o' lantern not at all sure what I'm listening to but having a wonderful time.

I was at Egyptian school the other day finishing off my project. A few kings emerged because of an elastic threading problem. You thread through two holes at a time, you make a necklace. You thread through one hole at a time, you make a crown because the difference in width between the top and bottom becomes less. A happy discovery as it happens, crowns were equally acceptable but it did make me think that when planning an activity like this for children you should test it to destruction with your eight year old head on making every deliberate mistake you can possibly think of to avoid disaster on the day.

I took along some beads for threading to keep the children who finished last week amused. They did look fab in all their regalia and have asked me along to Egyptian afternoon on the 2nd March. I've to let them know if I'm toot-en-coming or not. Depends if I can get my sarf-off-i-gus!

No cheeze...

No pics today. Camera batteries dud and no spares with me. Blogger - or some other swear word. Great workshop though. 16 little kiddiewinkies who had been given disposable cameras and set loose in a museum. Today their pics came back and they were well pleased with them. We were making books to put the pictures in.

They romped through three different book making techniques in three quarters of an hours. They made two puzzle books with no glue and no sewing where you just cut and fold a single sheet of paper. Then they opened up some envelopes and stitched them back together again up the middle a la pamphlet style. All this was accomplished easily but when it came to gumming a long strip of envelopes together by their flaps to make a zigzag book, we had crisis! 'I don't like the taste' was the cry. So we masking taped them together instead and glued on a bit of corrugated paper on for the spine.

All this was hectic and chaotic and involved a fair amount of shouting and bending over mid-spine (always a killer). When the books were assembled we started designing our covers with tissue paper and magazine pages and silence fell. Ahhhhhh, concentration, a wonderful thing! The kids were right into it and I'm going to focus on a lot more of this next time with perhaps just one other very simple book construction technique to keep up my sleeve in case they get bored.

I don't think boredom was high on the agenda today as their group leader told me they don't usually work at that pace. Half way through the day a beautiful child with long red hair had to point out to me that he as a boy and would I please stop calling him a girl. Another angelic little girl, who really was a girl, had a great time cutting swear words out the magazines. And that was Country Living! She must have had to go some.

Say cheeeeze!

I'm preping for a kids book making and collage class. They want to make photo albums.I've used a couple of forms of envelope books and based the collage ideas on an old sketchbook of mine where I decided to cut holes in the pages and replace them with grids of different kinds. My source was photographs of autumn leaves blown up against wire structures of various kinds.





































Photo peeking out of envelope window.




























Now you see it!






Look through any window.....


























Taking inspiration from the stripes in the photo to change the scale and put stripes over the photo.






















Playing with facial features.

























Extending your frame to echo your photo.







I want the kiddie versions to be very rough and ready with no measuring and no possibility of going wrong. That's why my samples are so rough and ready. It's not that I'm a lazy, careless bissum. Well...........I am, but that's beside the point.

Velvet Pause

Another lovely workshop playing with velour and disperse dyes.

Egyptian Creations

Lovely day at Egyptian school today. Do you like their necklaces? I had 21 little creatures of very mixed ability. It was a sequence of gluing, cutting and folding repeated ten times. Some kids took one look at the demonstration and had it down pat while others were still confused tenth time round. This must make school teaching a very difficult job.

When the collars were dry (ish) we rubbed them with Treasure Gold and Silver. With young kids you always have to explain that you don't dig finger nail deep into pot of rub on gilding cream. The words 'light' and 'gentle' were hugely open to interpretation and ranged from hardly visible to all over clothes, desk and face.

About three or four children completed their project today. I'm going back next week as a volunteer for a couple of hours to help the others finish off. Good fun!

40 Drawings

A group of my chums have committed to making 40 drawings before 24th February. I made one today. One stitched drawing inspired by Lucian Freud. His portrait of his mother. By inspired, I guess I mean copied. Not traced though. Just machined free hand with the book at my side. A very good exercise in observation. Every time you think you're finished and you compare the two you find something else you've failed to see. I'm sure you if you practiced this a lot it would definitely help your observation skills.

Silent Poetry Day

'Tiger, tiger, my mistake,
I thought that you were William Blake'

Don't know where this couplet comes from but it has always been one of my faves along with Ogden Nash (may very possibly be his). My memory is patchy at best but check him out for yourself if you are not already a fan.

I'll leave you with the probably mis-remembered misogynist ditty...

'Curses on him on mutters as the evening waxes moister,
If only he'd eaten the woman, if only he'd married the oyster'

Have a poetic day.

Where's Mark Anthony when you need him?

I've been asked to spend an afternoon with some primary school children helping them with their Egyptian project. Thought we could have a go at this cardboard, string and tissue paper necklace which makes rather a groovy hat when you wear it upside down! Or should that be downside up?