Quilts for London

This week, the after school Craft Club set about on a new project. I had picked up a leaflet during a recent trip to Stockwood Park at half term and was keen to join this great looking project with the children of NB School.

Quilts fo London is a year long project encouraging people of all ages and abilities to make a Pennant for a London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Athlete.

Over the weeks we have been designing and sewing different things and it was an ideal project to do over the last few sessions before Easter.

The children work well when they have a brief (don't we all) so I set them the project of looking at and being inspired by Icons from previous Olympic games. They were easily found by Googling "Olympic Icon Images". We looked at how a simple line drawing represented a specific sport quickly and compared how different countries had devised a visual style.

I particularly like the Vintage group from Mexico in 1968 and the most recent Icons from the Beijing games in 2008. The Mexico ones are very stylish and you know exactly what sports they represent and the Beijing Icons look like Chinese characters as well as the sports they represent. Very cleaver.

Anyway.......the children had copies of these Icons to inspire them and they came up with a number of designs.

Chose the best one and drew it up onto an A4 piece of paper, then fabric. They then used their favourite textile colour pens to complete the design. They cheered when I announced that they would use the pens again! Strange!!

The work so far, looks great, some really strong designs. Next week we will hand stitch them onto a base fabric and add some embroidery stitches.

I really want to let them loose with a sewing machine, but this will need more planning!!

In the class room today

The talented children in Craft Club have been working really well on this project. We started with some Zentangle doodling.

In week two, we 'framed' a square of the design and expanded it onto a larger square.

The designs were then coloured in with fabric pens, some of the children kept the design simple, some really went to town with their work.

I ironed the fabric pens for a few minutes to fix the colours.

The children have now spent 3 sessions embroidering along or between the lines. I thought they would soon get bored, but they have stuck at it and really worked very well. I will try and do some closeups next week with my decent camera.

I would love to make a large piece of work with these, they are very abstract and work well together I think.

For those speedy stitchers, I introduced them to the Japanese paper cutting theory of Notan. They started with a simple design and then with some more prompting, made their squares more complicated.

For those children who did not quite grasp the theory, we concentrated on making the design work as a balanced picture.

Actually, they were all striking and will be good starting points for the next project I think.

Good work :)