Fancy Fabric Collage

In a fun class for children ages 15-36 months I prepared a fun fabric collage project. This class went hand in hand with the OKCMOA's (now gone) exhibit, Sketch to Screen: The Art of Hollywood Costume Design. The exhibit featured many famous costumes that were worn in some of your favorite movies. Who doesn't love costumes?

First we talked about fabric. What is fabric? "Your shirt is blue fabric, your dress is pink fabric" "What color of fabric am I wearing?" Then we talked about costumes. "Do you ever play dress up? What is your favorite costume? We read a Halloween book, Spot's Halloween-which might seem odd in August, but it's about costumes and even has Spot and his friends in costumes that are in the exhibit...Superman, Cowboy, perfect. These are some of the things we leave the classroom and search through the exhibit for.



On a table in assembly line fashion I set our a variety of fabrics and ribbons in a rainbow of colors. (I also included scissors as an option for parents to use if they pleased.) I tried to incorporate a variety of textures as well. Each workstation had an 9x12 piece of interfacing (you could use cardboard, poster board or whatever!), tacky glue and glue stick.



The children went through the line and picked out the pieces they wanted to use and placed them down. It was easiest to have adult squeeze glue all over interfacing and have child place fabric pieces on top.



You will need:
-Interfacing or cardboard
-fabrics (precut to small shapes)
-ribbons
-glue
-scissors

So much fun! Here are some of our finished fabric collages!

Dress Me Up

This morning at the OKCMOA I had an eager group of toddlers join me for a fun class revolving around our new exhibit, Sketch to Screen: The Art of Hollywood Costume Design. It is a glorious exhibit filled with over 85 garments and accessories worn in Hollywood films that are on loan from private collectors and Hollywood Studios. IT IS AMAZING. It was a lot of fun to share with the children. In this class we gathered ideas from the exhibit and translated them to a collage person.

To begin we created a background for our costumed people. I gave the kids tag board and cut squares of construction paper. The used a glue stick to apply.





Next we visited the exhibit for inspiration and returned to create our little people. I had an assembly line of fabrics, felt, yarn, buttons, sequins and more for the kids to go through and take back to their workstation.



The kids made design choices, but the parents were on hand to help to cut the yarn and fabrics.





To finish we glued our people on our backgrounds and called it a day! Here are some of our finished projects.

Mother's Day Brooches

Happy Mother's Day!

Today my class of kiddos ages 3-5 came in with the favorite men in their lives to make something very special for Mom. We designed a fabric brooch for Mom and pinned it to a hand made card. Very special indeed.



I focused on fabric/textiles and design of this brooch to revolve around the exciting new exhibit at the OKCMOA, Sketch to Screen: The Art of Hollywood Costume Design. This new exhibit has been years in the making and was put together specially by our curators specifically for the OKCMOA. If you are local, I encourage you to come see this unique new exhibit that will be up through the summer. It has something for everyone of all ages.



This took a bit of prep work. I pre-cut all of the pieces. I cut stiff green felt for the backing and several fabrics of different colors and textures in 3 sizes, the largest circle being the size of the green felt.



The kids worked with their dads to assemble their brooch. They made design choices by deciding which fabrics to use and what order to put them in. When they were fully assembled with fabric, the dads used a yarn needle to attach a medium size flower button through all the layers to the top. To the top I hot glued a little sparkling gem to cover the thread and hot glued a bar pin to the back.





When the brooch was finished we worked on a card to pin our brooch to. We used construction paper and crayons to decorate the card. They wrote their messages and pinned on their brooches and we left the class to visit the exhibit. Perfect little gift full of a lot of love!









For this project you will need:
Brooches:
-Stiff green felt for backing
-fabrics of different colors, textures and sizes.
-flower button
-gem
-needle and DMC thread
-bar bin
-hot glue
-scissors for trimming

For cards:
-construction paper in different colors
-glue stick
-construction paper crayons
-scissors