Wednesday 9 March 2011

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!!



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