School Arts Week Project

This is what I have been busy with at the local junior school. For Arts Week they decided on African art, and Mrs Griffiths, who is co-ordinating it all, collared me in Mrs Rose's class one lunch time. ( I go there on a Thursday to teach her class how to cross stitch.). She asked if I could help that class do some thing for the event in stitching and said she was thinking " Sunset, mountains, silhouettes, etc" I said " are you confusing this class of 8yrs olds with a GCSE class?" lol Any way, the upshot was that I found some fantastic fabrics in our local fabric shop, many of them were for quilting place mats etc. So I grabbed them and together with Mrs Rose we toyed with several ideas, the main thing being that I could get the children to cut out the animals and quilt around them .... hopefully and we'd put together some sort of hanging. These came out fantastic, although when I told the children to pull the stitches a bit tighter to make the animals stand out a bit, the lad who did the legs of these rhino's got a bit carried away and pulled that tight I couldn't straighten the material again rofl. I took them home and machine sewed the borders on them, while the children painted the background with another 'helper' who obviously had a great 'eye' and did a fantastic job with them. Mrs Rose got the projector out and 'projected' an image on to some black felt like paper and the children drew around and cut out, the Masai Warrior. We purloined some of Mrs Rose's bead necklaces and cut out some fabric to make the cape and decorations and the boys ran around the school field to find a suitable twig to act as the warriors staff/spear lol

The final day was putting it all together, and we decided that fabric glue was the best bet, as trying to stitch it all together was going to be a night mare for the children. We left it to dry for a couple of hours then I took it home and sewed on the backing and the tabs. I did a few crafty stitches on the animal pieces as they hadn't glued right to the edges and I didn't want them falling off while it's hanging up lol When I took it in on Friday, the kids, and the headmaster, who came in for a sneaky peak, thought it was amazing.
It will be going up in the assembly hall on Monday with the rest of the school's work, masks, prints etc But just for now, Mrs Rose has hung it on her class wall so they can all admire their handy work rofl

Today is Fathers Day here in the UK and hopefully dad's all over the country will be getting spoilt. I'm especialy thinking of my own dad today, I miss him so much . The girls gave their dad some smellies, beer and chocs today, and tomorrow they are taking him go-karting as Janine had to work today and wasn't free.