SCRAP Holiday Bazaar

The entire Living School Elementary class,  15 kids aged 5-10, worked very hard for  over a month or so to get ready for the SCRAP Holiday Bazaar. The event spanned the weekend of November 20th and 21st inside the SCRAP store. There were nearly 20 vendors, all of whom sold gifts made almost entirely from reused materials. It was very inspiring to see what other things people made and the creative uses they had for materials.

 The kids all signed up for time slots to come manage the sales. Many of them had incredible sales skills, schmoozing with their public and using their people skills to encourage people to spend. But the quality of their work was really the selling point. We talked a lot about high quality and why it is important to make things well. This is one way we can save them from becoming garbage, one of our top objectives! It was great to see that the things they made at the end of our production period, with all of their practice, had advanced in quality considerably.

 One of our top sellers were our famed sea urchin ornaments. We found the shells at SCRAP. Immediately, we had the idea to turn them into jelly fish using many types of ribbon. The high quality ribbon was all salvaged or donated.

 The little pillows you see here are "Bed Bugs" that the children decorated and sewed. They are filled with grains and lavender. When placed in the microwave for a few seconds they get warm and help with aching muscles or keep you cozy on a cold night.

                           Our display comprised of donated, borrowed and re-used materials.

The garland on the front of the table was made by water coloring paper, cutting out circles and gluing to thread. Immediate, simple and cheap beautification!

                                       Beautiful hand painted gift boxes sold for only $2.00

 

These are tile coasters that we decoupaged with the children's drawings, paintings and spin art.

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During a lull, one of our 5 year olds made this pleading sign. Fortunately, when you are working with children you can get away with these blatant attempts. Coming from them, they are adorable.

While this opportunity was invaluable for the children and their life experience, I cannot sign out here without mentioning that WE TOTALLY MADE OUR GOAL for craft sales! We are beyond pleased and happily surprised by the fact that the kids sold nearly all of their crafts. Now, we have been having serious discussions about how to spend (or save) the cash.  The few items we have left have been set up on a makeshift table at school to sell to parents and friends.


If you missed this sale, SCRAP has plans for an ongoing boutique in the near future.

The Elfen Factory

We have been hard at work all month long in preparations for the SCRAP Holiday Bazaar. All of our handmade gifts needed to be made almost entirely of re-used materials. We had a long list of items to make and kept thinking of more. Finally, Michelle and I agreed to stick with: gift tags, gift boxes, magnets, frosted glass votive holders, sketchbooks, eye pillows, garlands and ornaments, including our magnificent pieces des resistances: the Urchin Ornaments ( see picture in next post).

We needed one hardcore day in the shop though, to really churn out those last items. So the class took a field trip to SCRAP to use their workshop. Within an hour we had made more than we ever did in two back at school, it seemed.

The main reason we needed to go there to work was to use the drool-inducing die cut machine. I am not sure who likes this more, the kids or the teachers. This is a wonderful invention that cuts paper and other materials into a desired shape. In our case it was gift tags with a little hole and several box shapes that we could fold into a finished product.

The paper we used for these products we decorated with "spin art"- paint in a salad spinner & watercolor and we used blueprint vellum salvaged at SCRAP. We then finished them off with fancy ribbons.

Thank you to SCRAP for letting us use your space and tools!!

Re Use Center

We finally moved into our new class space in late October. Michelle, another parent and teacher at The Living School and I spent a day setting up and organizing our grand new studio! This is very exciting considering storage of our art supplies last year was in the bathroom.

Keri Piehl, the education director at SCRAP ( http://scrapaction.org/ ) came in to help us set up our Re-Use Center. The parents and students have been saving up items for us to re-purpose into art that would otherwise wind up in the trash. Keri also brought some interesting things from SCRAP's inventory to share with us. Included in these items were milk cartons, plastic Easter eggs, red plastic netting that held fruit, odd plastic bits, plastic 2 liter bottles, upholstery strips, etc...

All of the stuff we'd collected was completely disorganized and look well, basically like a bunch of garbage. Keri led the kids in letting them decide the best way to organize it. A few people made suggestions of how we could do this: by size, material, etc...Finally, after a democratic vote they all agreed to sort it out by color.

The kids divided into groups and were in charge of certain colors. It was an organized chaos and there was a lot of mad activity as people went through boxes and piles. It was interesting to hear them discuss what an object's true color was. In some eyes an object was green, in others it was yellow.

Finally, all of our junk was starting to look really pretty. This was seeming to me like a wonderful way to organize just about anything. Color plays such an important role in aesthetics. And it was helping my brain make sense of the jumbled objects.

Once everything had a home, the children made labels to put on the boxes and bins. Some of the bins we had correlated with the objects in them. And they used matching colored pens to make the labels.

I am sure that there are many ways to sort out these objects that are destined to become art. I really had nothing to do with how it all came together as the kids were the ones how led the project. But I am quite pleased with the outcome, being the one who manages the supplies and spends time in the studio. Crayons, paints, paper and other art supplies in a store are organized by order of color and so why shouldn't these supplies? If I was a blue milk jug lid or a purple plastic Easter Egg, I'd be feeling pretty fancy about now.