Magic and Mayhem

This week’s theme for Unplug Your Kids is soft.  We had a hard time coming up with a good project for it for some reason.  In the end I made up a puffy “quilted” art project.  It was a lot of work for the kids and I’m impressed with how carefully they did it.  In the end, it was a good experiment because I realized I’d made it 3 times harder than it needed to be. 

What we did:

1.  I instructed the kids to draw a simple design (of a real thing like a flower or fish or just a pattern) in pencil on a piece of cardstock.  Once they liked it, they were to go over it with a black marker.  I told them to make sure everything in it was a space, not a line, because we would be cutting shapes to fill it.  I also told them to make sure every shape was big enough to glue a shape down and fill it up.  Victoria googled quilt designs and chose to do one called “broken dishes.”  Jack and Anna just did a freeform design.

2.  I had each of us pick 3 fabrics from our scrap fabrics and the rag pile.  I save the kids’ clothes that are ruined (big holes, unsalvageable stains) for rags and crafts so we have lots to craft with.  Our 3 picks each went into the pile on the table for everybody to use.

3.  I had the kids cut the fabric into the shapes, a tiny bit larger than the drawing.  Then they traced inside that shape with glue and we folded up pieces of toilet paper to put in the shape to make them puffy or quilted.  They pressed down on all sides and added more glue as needed.  You could use cotton balls but toilet paper is cheaper and I didn’t want to use our cotton balls up. 

(Note Anna’s new guitar on her back!  I must blog about that later.  She loves it!)

4.  Repeat for the whole design and let dry.  Voila!

What I’d recommend instead to make this a MUCH simpler craft:

1.   Cut some large, basic shapes out of lots of different fabrics and have the kids use them to plan their designs  (instead of making up a design and cutting to match).  Cut basic shapes that will work with what they’re planning.  For instance, a thick line for a flower stem and some leaf and petal shapes for making flowers.

2.  Proceed as above.

The finished result is really pretty neat.  It’s soft, squishy and 3-D.  If the whole page isn’t covered with the design, you could finish the project by either painting around the raised areas, coloring in a design or glueing down cotton balls but we were happy as they were.  :)  This would also be a fun way to do a unit on quilts, with each child choosing a favorite quilt pattern to duplicate.  Now that I know what we did wrong I have a lot of ideas for simple projects to do next time!