School Age Handpaints

Isn't that just gorgeous? This was my art project today in my school age program. We ordered some Bare WOTA from Knit Picks, picked up some bargain koolaid from Aldis and let them at it, all smocked up of course. Unfortunately I forgot my real camera, otherwise I would have taken some rockin' photos of the process.

One of the things that I enjoyed most about this project was watching the different learning paths that students embarked on for their dying. You see I didn't really tell them how to do it. I showed them an example and let them work independently, helping when needed and explanations of different techniques at the appropriate times.

It was pretty neat to watch the iterative process that some of the older students went through in their dying. One experimented with mixing right there in her saran wrap and came up with a skein that she called messy wheat. Then she just dropped the dyes in discrete areas, carefully mixing certain spaces. Another young gal experimented with over dying in her first skein and then long single color repeats in her second making sure that no over dying occurred. Then these two got together and shared their knowledge and made a few collaborative works. Some of the younger students saw their methods and relied on imitation for inspiration for their creations and experimented with negative space and the like for their unique touches.

On a more practical note, this was the first time I did the microwave method, and my only complaint is that I think there are a few tricks to the whole saran-wrap thing that people have been keeping off the 'net.

Basically, you have to be a saran-wrap rustler. I am a complete imbecile with the stuff and can barely get it out of the box and onto a surface or rim without major mishaps occurring along the way. But to put down a 4 foot long piece and then wrap the skein up later so that "things" aren't touching requires quite a bit of saran-skill. And I didn't read anything about this.

Our Fix: We discovered that rolling the edges over the yarn on each side of our skeins worked best. I also used extra pieces of plastic wrap on the ends for added coverage.