and the winner is! plus kindergarten felting!

My random number generator of an 8 year-old son has spoken, & abcgirl is the winner!  Thanks for all the comments, & thanks for the list of music to check out.  Lots of familiar names, but lots that are new to me, which promises some fun poking around on iTunes.

Around here?  My latest favorite album is Midnight Boom by The Kills, but I am also really liking Hideaway by The Weepies.  With the kids, Beauty & the Beat is in heavy rotation, also various Ramones songs, a B-52s greatest hits compilation, & Elizabeth Mitchell's You Are My Little Bird hasn't really faded away since we saw her last year.

-----

Today I had the task of mounting the flat felt pieces the kindergarteners made last week in the second of our two felting sessions.

I used the leftover adhesive photo mount squares from the auction project & stuck the felt to pieces of 8x8 cardstock.  Easier & quicker than glue, & the squares will hold the felt nicely behind glass & well enough for a piece that gets tossed in the bottom of someone's kindergarten art 08-09 box.  I used to use those squares quite a bit years ago when I was more into book & paper arts, but am finding them handy in all sorts of ways these days.  An excellent (& cheap!) rediscovery.

Anyway, it was fun to get the felt pieces home & really take a look at them.  This project was a little tricker for the kids than making beads & ropes (our first felting lesson, which I am just now realizing I completely didn't write about), but was perfectly manageable (we had around 25 kids, 4 adults, & 30 minutes to get things done.  This project requires enough dexterity that all 4 adults were kept very busy helping the whole time.).  We did plastic bag felting:  each kid laid out a wool background (two layers of wool strips, strips slightly overlapping on each layer, layers laid perpendicular to each other), added a design on top, then a grownup tucked the whole thing into a quart-sized freezer zipper bag, added some soapy water, & the kid proceeded to smash, squish, & scrunch the whole thing until felt magically appeared.

I essentially used the instructions from Kleas (complete with pictures!), but instead of pouring a bunch of water in & then squeezing it out into a towel, each of the adults had a big narrow-tipped squeeze bottle & we just squirted warm soaped-up water into each kid's ziploc for a count of 10.  We also bypassed the final step of shocking the felt with alternating hot/cold water, but for kindergarten purposes, it was totally fine to skip it.

My demo piece for the kids was a tree, which of course ended up showing up quite a bit in their own work.

 

This kid was very careful in all steps of the project, from wool layout (his pieces were nicely fluffy & loosely laid out, which makes it much easier for the wool to tangle together & felt up) to meticulous & patient smashing of his wool-filled baggie.  I think he probably got the smoothest, feltiest result.

 

However, I think I might love this kid's tree ON FIRE just a little bit more.

Comments

[abcgirl]

no way! does that really say that i won the drawing? i'm thrilled!

AND... i love the felting in a ziploc idea. i may have to use that at my library this summer....

I am also a big, big fan of Elizabeth Mitchell. If you like her music, I'd also recommend the band Dog on Fleas or the singers Johnny Bregar and Kira Willey. All on my top favorites list.

:) yippee!

[Sarah]

Oh, I'm glad your blog shows me you're okay and creating! I didn't get a reply to my email a few months ago re: more birth announcements and thank yous. As you know, we looooved our "Little Pea" announcements two years ago, and now we have a Twinkle due around July 2. Hmmh...maybe I'll try emailing one more time in case you're open to rolling the printing presses again. Or you can email me, cloudsar -at- hotmail.

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I was looking at your quilts and they are beautiful. How do you get that lovely quilting in the squiggly pattern? I would have no idea where to start.

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