Friday, May 22, 2015

Do You Need An Idea For An Art Party?

     Do you sometimes run out of ideas for group activities? I wanted to have an art party at my house and this idea popped into my head. 

Everyone will started with an identical piece of fabric  10 x 10 with the same line or a mark on it. (That I provided.) 
cotton with felt underneath and line drawn with a marker

I put a box in the center of the table with threads and other objects in it. The other guests brought things to contribute to the box.

These are the directions I sent out ahead of time:
1.) Each person changes one thing on their piece of fabric by taking something from the box and adding to their fabric.
2.) They pass their fabric to the person on their right.
3.) Each person changes one thing on their piece of fabric by taking something from the box and adding to their fabric. Or by adding something of their own accord that they brought.
4.) They pass their fabric to the person on their right.
5.) Each person changes one thing on their piece of fabric by taking something from the box and adding to their fabric. Or by adding something of their own accord.
On it goes until we declare it finished. Each takes one home.
Sometime in there, we'll break for lunch.

What to bring:
Items to put into the box that would be good to add to the fabrics to make for fun compositions.
Items to not add to the box that you might want to use for yourself on the fabrics.
Scissors, sewing needles.

Things I had in the box: buttons, found objects, fabric scraps, Inktense pencils, markers. Off to the side I had a container of water for the Inktense pencils, a paintbrush, and a huge container of embroidery floss.

There were 6 of us and we spent about 10 minutes on each step. Sometimes I forgot to look at the clock and we spent longer. By the time the cloths came back around to the original person, we were hungry so we called it finished. It was interesting that some people rotated them as as they went around. At the end we put them in a bag and randomly chose one from the bag to take home. Then we enjoyed a nice lunch. Here are the results.
Sample 1

Sample 2
Sample 3

Sample 4
Sample 5
Sample 6
     Now I have no idea which side is up on any of them except for Sample 2 with the bird and cat. I think all of them are pretty impressive especially since we worked quickly. One of the members already took hers home and did more work on it and is sewing a fabric edge around the four sides and is planning to hang it. We liked it so much that we may propose to do it with our art group ArtsEtc., also.
     I even dressed up my Xian warrior for the event.
in the entrance hallway

     So if you need another group activity, this is one that can be done in a little over an hour if everything is set up ahead of time. It worked well for a group of six.  I think it could work for up to nine people. If you have more than that, you might want to split up into smaller groups. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find more art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists' posts so that they know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.


18 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. It was a lot of fun. When time was called to pass to the right, everyone was saying no, no, no because we were really into what we were doing.

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  2. Thank you Regina. This looks like fun and I will try it with my art group. Barbara (SAQA member)

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    1. Yes, go for it. And I'm sure there are a lot of modifications you could make to the procedure to add to the fun, too.

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  3. Great! I have used a similar simplified idea as warm up when I teach my prayer flag workshops.

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    1. Community type projects are always gratifying.

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  4. omg can I come play??? What a cool activity. Which one was yours to keep?? Leeanna

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    1. I'm so lucky to have my art friends. I got to keep sample #1.

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  5. I too like this idea and hope I can use it sometime.

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  6. Did something similar with more people in small groups many years ago. We started with painted papers but added stitch and more (torn) papers etc. Some people loved it, others hated having to pass on what they had done. They saw it as 'spoiling' their own idea, so one needs to choose participants carefully!

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    1. oooh I could see doing this with papers on maybe 4x6 cardstock and then you'd have the front of a greeting card. I guess we got lucky because no one here minded passing them on.

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  7. An intriguing idea. I once did something similar when playing with printing.

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    1. I thought of adding paint and printing, but we were working in my living room so that we could sit comfortably in a circle around a coffee table. Printing would be lots of fun.

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  8. What a fun activity and you got some very cool results!

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    1. We all had such a nice time and were delighted with the outcome.

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  9. I will def do this with my group, thankyou

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