Melissa's Melting Pot

Felting is a simple and effective way of allowing children to explore textiles through a craft, wet felting lends itself well to the classroom environment as it is easy enough to set up and each child will be able to do this technique.If you want details of how to wet felt there are loads of tutorials on you tube or even google wet felting and you will find a wide range of sites and blogs to help you. Here are some photos of my felting work.

Here are some photos of my final etching :)

In our seminars we also looked at printing, specifically at etching. We used an intaglio/dry point technique and then printed using printing inks and put them through a roller press. To do this you had to take a piece of perspex and a sharp object such as the end of a nail and scratch you design onto the perspex. You have to also remember that your design will be the opposite to how you are drawing it when you print so you have to take care with lettering that you etch it on the wrong way round onto your perspex to have it print the right way round. This photo show the perspex and scratching tool. After you have etched the design you want you the apply a small blob of printing ink onto your printing plate (the perspex). To make this easier we used a toothbrush to spread the ink evenly and get it into the scratches you made on the perspex. You then remove the excess ink from your plate using newspaper and cloth, this should mean you can see the lines you have etched in

Double Elephant Print states that ‘Artists are drawn to printmaking because it can provide a language of marks, a richness of colour and depth and other unique characteristics that can’t be achieved in any other way.’ I think that this statement is true as each print is a unique piece of artwork in itself and will not be recreated/copied exactly twice. It also means that children can really explore mark-making and line as the lines when printing are clear and defined. During saturation week I lead four press printing lessons and from that was able to observe the children’s thought and discussion processes when carrying out these prints. We used polyboard and printed our tessellations meaning we had a cross curricular link with Maths meeting ‘Reasoning: K - search for pattern in their results; develop logical thinking and explain their reasoning’ and Art ‘4b - materials and processes used in art, craft and design and how these can be matched to ideas and intentions’ from the

‘Collage appeals to children because it is essentially about transformation: torn strips of paper could become an autumn landscape, while Frankenstein’s monster might emerge from the contents of a rubbish bin.’ (Cole, S. et al)  This quote sums up the appeal of collage to me, that children can use anything from recycled materials to painted tissue paper created deliberately for the purpose of collaging with. To create our own collages we inked tissue paper to create the desired colours needed and then continued to tear the paper to create desired shapes. Another appeal of collage is that it is an inclusive technique and you do not need to be the best at drawing or painting. Therefore it may give children within your class the freedom to experiment with shape, texture and colour without the need to make their picture look ‘right’. Being an inclusive side of art this may mean that it would be suited to not only younger children who will be learning through play and experimentat