Egyptian Headdress Craft at de Young Museum

On Friday night I conducted an Egyptian Art Deco headdress activity at the de Young Museum for their closing Friday Night event for the King Tut exhibit. It was a blast. I had my children as my assistants. Here is a link to the PDF files if you want to print these out and try them out at home or in a class. These templates at a new textile blog site for my textile research. I haven't figured out how to embed Scribd files in Blogger and for the other blog I am using Weebly; it is easy to insert the files so you will find I have posted them there instead of here.

Anyway here are some images from the evening. It was so fun!! I will be adding more images soon.





















Above: This woman was fabulous!
Below: My children were great models and assistants:
















Below: This guy spent a long time perfecting his headdress. He and his friends were so dedicated to their creations that they sprawled out on the floor when there was no more room at the tables. I had printed 100 of each of the four designs and only had a small stack of maybe 30 afterward. I had also cut around 200 bands and we ran out around 7:40 (event ran close to 9:00 pm). We were able to get some white card stock paper and we cut those for the headband strips. (Thanks, intern, Alex!)




















Below: This young artist was very creative.
She started to hole punch the gold paper and add the gold punched pieces as decorative elements to her design. Many visitors started to do this, too, after I shared with them what this artist had done.

de Young Museum Workshop

At the final Friday Night event of the King Tut exhibit at the de Young I will teaching a fun Egyptian crown and circlet craft activity. This event is March 26th. Here are a few rough sketches. Here are sketches of a headdress activity. Visitors will color in bold Egyptian inspired motifs that are Xeroxed onto cardstock. They then cut out and assemble an assortment of these and attach them to a headband and embellish with beads, and foils. The graphics will have a bit of a stylized Art Deco flair (I would create the different motifs in Illustrator).

Digital Textile from de Young visitor project

A few days ago I received the test fabric I ordered from Spoonflower. The colors came out great. Here is my daughter modeling the scarf I made of the textile.


The image pattern was created by scanning paper and wire tiles created by visitors to the de Young Museum during my residency a year ago. The images were aligned in Photoshop and sent as a jpg file to Spoonflower to print.

De Young Residency Revisited in Textile Design

A year ago I had an artist residency at the de Young Museum and designed a visitor participatory project of wire and repurposed materials.







































I saved most of the visitor created tiles and have scanned a few for experimentation in my textile designs. I have sent this below pattern tile to Spoonflower for a test swatch. I have hundreds of these unique round butterfly tiles created by adults and children who visited the de Young during my residency. I selected these few for my fabric design.
























You can design a repeat pattern in Photoshop by selecting the area of your image to repeat and then select Edit: Define Pattern. Below is a swatch of area created with this technique.
























I discovered that I could also increase the random look by selecting "half drop" in the Spoonflower settings. I am interested in the creation of textiles that are touched by many individuals hands and imaginations. Designing textile patterns which draw upon public collaborative projects is a fascinating direction to me. What garments and objects can be sewn from such unique fabrics and how can these sewn objects reflect further on community?

Lords of The Samurai

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum hired me to create eight craft lesson plans that tie into their current Lord of The Samurai exhibit. Each project is designed to be simple and use a downloadable template and instructions. These projects are introduced on the Lord of the Samurai blog and then from there link to there website where you can download the template files and instructions.
Below are images of the projects created so far.
Samurai Helmet (Kabuto):























Here is a sample instruction sheet. This series of projects has really gotten me to work with the software program Illustrator again. This particular helmet project was difficult to design in a simple manner. Earlier versions were much more detailed and complicated and even this simplified version's instructions were a challenge to fit on one page. The are three separate pages of templates for this project as well.























Samurai Half Mask (Mempo Mask) complete with sweat drain tubes (made of straws) and whiskers made of recycled produce netting:























Samurai Tosei Gusoku-Type Armor:























Samurai Sword:













Hands down, this was my son's favorite project. You can see from his face how thrilled he is to have created one. He helped me design it, too. This is his prototype.























Next I will be creating the lesson plan for a haiku project. I have conducted haiku projects several times with elementary school children and it is very entertaining and engaging. All these templates will be posted on The San Francisco Asian Art Museum's website (scroll to the bottom of the webpage to see them). The museum will be uploading a new project every week.

In a few years I hope to put together a book of all the various museum craft projects I have created. I have quite a collection now. I think that some can be quite fun for adults, too; I have been asked if I do bridal showers and corporate events when I conduct my paper hat workshops. Recycled materials are often designed into my projects adding an important if subtle conservation message. Below is one such project (for the de Young Museum) that used recycled sample wallpaper books, discarded tie fabric and produce netting to create fun and stylish hats.

Final images from de Young Residency

I finally have images of all the pieces I created for my de Young Residency. I will add the dimensions later. Just wanted to post them all together as I don't have them up on my website yet.

Video shown in the Kimball Gallery during the residency is at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7BKRVB8CM/

Top Hat Workshop

I will be conducting another hat making workshop at the de Young for their Friday Night event on March 13th. I did the same workshop last month and it was really fun. We used wallpaper sample sheets, buttons, ribbons and recycled produce netting. I got a lot of the supplies at SCRAP in San Francisco. Here are some images of my children in the top hat design.





































































The templates and instructions for this project are on my website.
http://www.okadadesign.com/workshop_4_top_hat.htm

Instructions and templates for the flower hat project I will also be teaching:
http://www.okadadesign.com/workshop_5_flowerhat.html

I hope to have a few more hat designs to post soon. Thinking about hats I was reminded of a paper bag hat assignment I created a few years back for elementary school students.

Below is my son in one of the sample hats I created for this project.

























This project was inspired by Outside artist Moses. Images of his work are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurareilly/2897171477/

Other people inspired by his work:
http://amarettogirl.squarespace.com/blog/2008/6/22/the-potential-of-a-brown-paper-bag.html

de Young Museum Artist Reception

Here are a few pictures taken by Lori Paladino for my artist reception at the de Young. Sue Kwon was one of the announcers.