Making Monsters

Sometimes it is good to try a longer term project with children in a few small segments of time. In three or four one hour settings, most of my 56 students, ages 6 and up made these little creatures of their own design. Few of them had done any handsewing before and yet after the initial few falters, embraced the process with zeal! One boy told his mother at the end of the hour that he was going to sew all of his own clothes from that point on. Pretty ambitious for age 7. The process was pretty simple. They drew their monster on paper first. They drew it a second time on a piece of mid weight canvas about 18 inches by 12 inches large.Using acrylic paint and a wet brush, they painted the front of the monster. The next hour was spent by cutting out the front of the monster close to the edge of the design and tracing it onto another piece of canvas. They then painted the back of the monsters and embellished the fronts if they wanted to with scraps of material, strong glue, sewn on buttons, puffy paint, and other bits of collected items.

The next 2 hours were spent using tapestry needles (they are blunt and don’t hurt little fingers as quickly as other needles) and colorful embroidery floss. I used the floss at full strand, doubled and knotted at the end.

They then stuffed the creatures with poly fluff and finished sewing them up. The entire collection will be hung for a month at our local library children’s room, which is fitting, as such hard work deserves to be recognized!