frenchtown fiber

Chris Mundy and Kate House try to make art while navigating the crap life throws at them.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Art Club Flies Again

Flying by the seat of my pants, that is. This is a great way to get teaching experience, because everyone is so forgiving.

My plan was to supply everyone with a wine bottle. My husband and I worked really hard all summer, and we managed to drink enough wine to supply most everyone with a clear bottle. (I have no idea how much of the wine we drank this summer came in a green bottle, I didn't save many of those) I had tissue paper in several colors for everyone to tear up and glue to the bottles. Then I had labels for everyone. I put the labels in PowerPoint, and I figured we could go on the computer and type in the potion names they came up with. I brought it in on a disk. I made sure I would have use of a computer and a printer. Unfortunately, I assumed that the computer would have Microsoft Office installed. That is so common, but... NO. They have virtually no softwear on these computers! I have no idea what they do with them! Without that softwear, I figured I needed to go to plan B, which was that we draw our own labels. No one cared except me, so no problem.

Before I investigated the computer situation, I gave a little demonstration about how to glue on the tissue. When I came back, I had some people that were already finished, some that were gluing giant pieces of tissue to the bottles, and some that not really doing it at all. So, I had to get that situation under control. I asked everyone to think up a potion for the project before coming in, thinking that would save some time. Only Kate thought of anything ahead of time. So I went around to try to help people think up some kind of interesting potion. This can be like pulling teeth. Most of the time I ended up making different suggestions until I said something they liked. It's times like those that I think that maybe my expectations are too high for this group. But that is part of the learning process for me, I suppose. Kate came up with a couple of good ideas, for example, a potion called "Creep-Away," for certain situations on public transportation, but in the end she came up with a "Teleportation" potion.

When  Everyone had a decent label, I handed out stickers and jewels to decorate the bottles. Everyone got pretty involved with that, with a minmum of arguing who was hogging up all of the sparkly spiders.

Pretty much all of the participants have signed photo releases, but just the same, I will only post this picture of Kate. See the
Art Club Blog for other pictures and the potion ideas.

I'm thinking of fabric wall hangings for a Christmas/Winter project. My day to do that is December 1st. The only way to do this is with iron on fabric pieces, which I will have to plan out ahead of time. More on this as I figure it out.

2 comments:

ArtPropelled said...

It must have been hard work emptying all those wine bottles ....LOL.

Chris said...

Yes, but we were able to make this sacrifice for the sake of art!