Quilt Patchwork Patterns

How Quilts Evolved From Necessities To Art

Imagine that you are living on a small farm in a cold place. Life is hard and you have to make do with whatever is at hand in order to survive. You live off the land and your livestock. You use whatever money you earn from selling eggs or your labor for buying necessities like clothes and you wear the clothes until they wear out.

You know the value of your possessions and don’t let anything go to waste. Therefore, when your clothes wear out, you keep the remaining scraps and use them for making things like curtains and bed covers. The bed coverings made from those scraps are called quilts. The first quilt sets were laboriously hand sewn from small scraps of worn out clothes.

In order to make your quilts cozy and warm, you learn from your geese and ducks, who fluff their feathers to keep warm. You collect and save all the feathers and separate the coarse larger feathers from the fluffy white down. Little by little, you fill your quilt with them until it is filled with down and warm as toast. Oh, what a luxurious feeling!

Because the winters are so long and cold, you occupy your time by making decorative quilts out of your best bits of cloth. When springtime comes, you take them to the outdoor market in the nearest town and try to sell them to make a little extra money.

One day a well-heeled woman notices one of your beautiful down quilts. She appreciates the craftsmanship, but doesn’t approve of the rough material you have used. She offers to pay you to make her a quilt using finer clothes. Of course you accept.

No one can say for sure who made the first luxury quilt set, but it’s a good bet its origin was something like that described above. Even though modern quilts are rarely hand-stitched, there is still a mystique about patchwork quilts. As a matter of fact, a famous quilt artist learned her craft by stitching together quilts in a tiny stone dwelling in her freezing Orkney island home.

Today, that woman lives on a larger farm in the Kentucky hills. She no longer makes patchwork quilts for her family. She makes works of art that hang in some of the best galleries in America. Her husband doesn’t have to cut firewood with a handsaw, but he still cuts his own, using husqvarna chainsaws. She and her large family still live modestly, even though she is a well known artist.

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe not, but it’s true. Sometimes, the most humble craft can evolve into high art.

Encouraging art and creativity in your children

If you're reading this article, chances are you have a creative soul and love to let your immagination soar - because - why else would you be visiting a site aimed at crafts, hobbies and other such creative pursuits?You may well be talented and artistic however, have your children inherited this creativeness and resourcefullness? And if they haven't - are there ways you can stimulate an interest in them? Here are a few tips as to what you can do…

Encourage creativity in your children by providing them with the time, resurces and the space for making art.Set aside some interruption-free quality time for drawing, in a mess-proof zone - so that their creativity can run wild. Make sure you cover all surfaces so that any splashes of paint or scribbles of crayon are ‘caught’ - because  nothing squishes creativity more so than a parent saying “Don’t make a mess” every 2 minutes.

It is also very important to choose the right drawing materials as well. Many craft materials can be improvised, but when drawing tools and paper are required, opt for a small selection of good quality age-appropriate products, rather than loads of inferior products. Always ensure that you check safety information and follow instructions. Young children should always be surpervised during ‘art time’ because many necessary materials - such as crayons - pose a choking hazard.

Surroundings: As with writing or working at a computer, good posture and a comfortable position are important for drawing. With young children, a child-size table and chair is actually preferable to an easel. If the chair is a little high, provide a phone book as a footrest. A coffee table and an inexpensive plastic chair work well. A small kitchen storage trolley is ideal for containing supplies, or if space does not permit, a portable tackle box is a good option too. Untidy toddlers may need a drop-cloth and supervision to avoid ink-stained walls, as even ‘washable’ pens often don’t deliver on that promise!

Art Materials: Avoid cheap markers, too-hard pencils and thin paints - these types of materials are discouraging to the child and therefore  a waste of money. Provide many sheets of blank paper to inspire their crativity and occasionally invest in a large canvas so that your child can paint something ‘grand’ and chances are you’ll want to hang it on your wall!  Provide also coloring books or coloring pages which are bountiful online - coloring pages are not so great for creativity, however they do provide children with the  chance to practice their fine motor skills and sometimes it’s very relaxing and just what they need to simply color in without the ‘pressure’ of thinking about WHAT to draw. 

For example little girls may enjoy coloring images of Barbie and at sites like Barbie Coloring Pages you’ll find the best Barbie printables

When it comes to drawing and coloring, at each age/stage of your child’s life provide….

Toddlers

• Child-safe markers and wipe-off boards
• Chalk boards and safe chalk
• Plain paper and coloring pages

Juniors

• Sketchbook
• Student colored pencils
• Washable Markers
• Oil pastels
• Plain paper and coloring pages

Middle School

• Sketchbook  or scrapbook
• Graphite Pencils
• Watercolor sketch paper
• Watercolor pencils
• Marker pens, marker paper
• Plain paper and coloring pages

High School

• Sketchbook  or scrapbook
• Quality drawing papers and boards
• Graphite Pencils
• Artists’ quality colored pencils
• Illustration markers, marker paper
• Pastel paper and hard pastels if liked
• Plain paper and canvases to work on

All ages

• Safe sharpeners, erasers, dusters, stencils and rulers
• A  folder for storing large pieces
• Storage boxes for smaller pieces
• Consider photographing or scanning pieces for a permanent record.

Spice up your Chrsitmas Holiday with some Kids Ornament Crafts

Christmas is a holiday where all kinds of kids crafts are created at home and in the school environment.

Crafts for kids, however should be an activity that should bring fun and excitement to children’s activities aside from adding a bonding to the adults that are doing the projects with them.

Educational arts and crafts is a way of doing crafts with children where they are not blindly copying the adults model but are creating things that they are capable of creating at their own developmental level.

When children create at their own level a number of things occur.

It creates a great feeling about themselves, as who can feel good about crafts projects that are copycat models of someone else’s. Children who create their own projects without adult input feel much better about themselves.

An even more beneficial side to educational arts and crafts is its inherent allowance for creativity.
There is very little that represses creativity more than having to copy anothers work.

There are a few categories that are part of educational art.
There is the cafeteria style that allows children to choose materials to work with, there is process only art where the process is what counts along with a few more.

The point of it is that all of the crafts under educational arts and crafts should be age appropriate, and allow for freedom of creation and expression.

Below I will give you 2 clear cut, almost effortless Christmas craft ornaments that you can make.

The first one uses plastic throwaway cups:

The kids can use permament markers to make many colorful designs on their cups. Try egging them on to fill in as much empty space on the cup as possible.

When they are done, take a cookie sheet and put the cups upside down on it and put in the over at around 350 degrees. Give them a few minutes so that they have time to melt. Look out for the amount of time the cups are in the oven as they can burn up completely. Don’t allow the children near this part as it gets very hot.

When they are cool, make a hole in the center and use colorful ribbon to hang as an ornament for your tree.

Another project is to take all of your old cd’s and dvd’s and use them for the project.

Basically: Decorate them and hang them.

There are tons of ways of enhancing the cd’s.

You can color with permanent markers, glue and glitter them, collage over them, decoupage over them, and decorate them with whatever shiny, decorative materials you can find.
Once they are done, get some pretty ribbon and hang them from your tree.

If you want to see what a crafts acitivity done in the cafeteria style is like then check out this Hanukkah Crafts collage