This was a spontaneous craft I thought of while I was actually on the way to school with a big bag of fabric, felt and ribbon that was donated from a shop that gave us all the ends of their ribbon rolls and a bargain price.
The theme was Love and Friendship. After singing some songs, we made these crafts. While making the crafts we melted down slabs of chocolate and molded them into Valentine candies too. We talked about why our best friends are so important to us.
I asked all of the kids to look at their clothing to see how a weave looks. I wore Indian handloom khadi just for this purpose, so they could see it better. We talked about how people say that our lives are like woven tapestries with all of our friends and experiences being different colours, textures and patterns that make us the person who we are.
Cut out base hearts in all sizes. Some of the kids wanted to do really large ones in teams, with their best friends. Others wanted to try their own with a smaller heart. One boy made quite a tiny heart!
Fold fabric in half and show how to make a perfect heart by cutting out half the pattern. The felt heart works well as the base. Open the heart out.
Now cut line slits into the base heart and begin weaving in any long pieces of ribbon, lace, fabric, string. The kids could not get the over-under-over-under-over pattern at first so they had to retry. The big mistake is that they'd follow the under-over-under pattern from the strand before, but they needed to do over-under-over this time. Each one has to be done opposite of the one before it. They got it! Then, they instinctively neatened the new strip, pushing it close to its neighbor, before beginning the next weave.
They decided to glue the edges down where the weaving ended to keep things in place. I was thinking of sewing things down but we ran out of time. Everyone LOVED their final pieces. The bigger pieces required true teamwork and cooperation. Everyone stayed with it and finished their piece so they could hang it up on our welcome board.
