Yes. I have been MIA for a while, I know.. but it’s been a pretty full on past few months (will reveal all soon) and thank heavens for school holidays!
Way back in May, Spotlight contacted me and asked if I’d like to help celebrate National Craft month? As part of the celebrations, I was asked to create something crafty, using any materials at all from a Spotlight store. In typical Adelle fashion, I chose something I had NEVER tried before, it was a ridiculously large scale and something that would take me months to complete. Inspired by the gorgeous works of Maryanne Moodie, I was going to create a woolen tapestry!
I headed off to Spotlight and bought a bunch of fun wool colours to begin. In the end, I only chose a select few but of course, I was going to bring this into my classroom, so all the excess wool was put to good use.
After watching a bunch of You Tube videos on how to create a cardboard loom, I began with much enthusiasm. Day after day, put off by the enormity of the task, my enthusiasm dwindled.
It’s not that it was boring, it was quite therapeutic most of the time, but I love immediate results when I create something and this certainly wasn’t one of those projects.
Never the less, I persisted and finally it was finished. Will I attempt another one? Probably. But it will definitely be on a much, much smaller scale.
As with most of the projects I work on, I always like to road test them on my students too. On a MUCH, MUCH, MUCH smaller scale, I gave this task a whirl with year 10s. I created the little loom boards for them and off they went.
As usual, some kids embraced it and wanted to take wool home to continue work on it and some kids could barely thread the needle. It’s a very time consuming project, so if you’re going to attempt this yourself or with your students, don’t forget that it will take patience and perseverance. In the end though, the results are pretty rewarding.
Leave a Reply