SchoolArts - December 2007

My great grandmother was quite particular about the stitches in her quilts. She felt that sloppy stitching said something about a person’s character. With this in mind, I told students they needed to have pride in their stitches. Even though they were going to draw their stitches, each “stitch” needed to be the same length and the spaces between the stitches need to be the same length.

I showed my example and demonstrated drawing proper stitches. Since we were making a crazy quilt I told the students their quilt blocks should have at least four different types of stitches. I handed out sheets with examples of embroidery stitches, their artwork, and extra-fine, black permanent markers. Students could use any of my examples or make up stitches of their own.

Joining the Blocks

Each block was mounted onto a 10 x 10" sheet of black construction paper. We laid down a long sheet of brown roll paper on our tables, positioned the blocks onto the paper, and then glued them in place. We measured, cut out, and taped together long strips of black roll paper and glued them on between each block.

pillow was set on top and other pillows were placed on a chair. The rest of the students’ work was combined for wall hangings. In the children’s words, “It was too cool!”

LaDora Flood is an elementary art teacher at Bloom-Carroll Elementary School in Carroll, Ohio. Ladoraf@earthlink.net

Display

For the art show, we turned a conference room into a bedroom. We used a long table as a bed and added a real headboard, a vase, and flowers. The top of a bed sheet was made by cutting paper doilies in half and taping them to the top of the quilt. A small

Students use visual structures and functions of art to communicate ideas.

home.howstuffworks.com/quilt-

blocks-channel.htm

Adding Black Silhouettes To embellish their blocks, I asked students to choose an animal or other object they wanted to make for a silhouette. They drew this shape on white paper and then cut it out and traced it onto black paper. This was then cut out and glued onto the quilt block. Before they glued down their objects I suggested that they play with the design first and again ask a buddy to give feedback. On the back of the block, I asked them to add their name, grade, color choice, and animal name or the name of whatever they used in their silhouette.