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

Recycled Folders Book Arts

I have a bunch of workshops coming up in March: kites, book arts, mixed media corsages, mixed media hats and two Earth Day assemblies. So I am blogging a lot these days to keep my thoughts organized. I am starting to prep materials for the various projects. Tonight I snipped the points off of bamboo skewers for the kite project. I am also cutting folders for a book arts project. I designed a book project using cool international stamps that were given to me by Deborah Corsini, the Curator of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. She also gave me the stamps my students used in The Peace Thoughts animation last year. We will also be using folders donated by Clif Bar. These folders were going to be recycled and I got a big box of them from my sister who works at Cilf Bar. Thank you Deborah and thank you Clif Bar!

The children will be given an enlarged image of a stamp and each child will be given a sheet with info about the country of origin and a small map of that country. The child will then choose snippets of information to include in the book and create a diorama on the Clif Bar folder. I think this will be a fun way to teach a little about geography and the history of stamps.
Below are a few of the stamps Deborah gave me.























I will post detailed info on this project on my workshop section of my website soon:
http://www.okadadesign.com/workshop.html

Below are images of the Clif Bar folders and the prototype I made. I just completed cutting the folders up (it took 1 hours and 30 minutes to cut 25 book forms with the windows). I'll be getting the ribbon at SCRAP in San Francisco on my next craft supply run. SCRAP is an awesome inexpensive resource for art materials. If you are in the Bay Area and do any kind of art, it is so worth checking out! http://www.scrap-sf.org/