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Crochet is a wonderful technique that can be used in a free form fashion to create an unlimited number of sculptural forms. Food is one of those Big Ideas everyone can relate to because we all love to eat! Students can be encouraged to create food that is special to their family or cultural celebrations. Creating a woven placemat to display their food creation on “frames” their work and also speaks to some of the rituals we have around preparing and serving food. Encourage students to reflect about their food memories before starting their project. Their reflection can be incorporated into their artist statement to show the wide array of stories they have concerning their favorite foods.
Basic Tools and Techniques for Weaving:
Step 2 – Instructor demonstrates basic chain crochet and single crochet. Oversees students as they learn the skill. Adapts for left-handed students.Crochet Note: Use resources listed in this lesson for images and process instructions of crochet for student learning: books, online articles with pictures, video tutorial.
Step 3 – Instructor demonstrates making the weaving boards and shuttles. Also instructs in basic warp winding on the weaving board. Instructor demonstrates basic tabby weaving using weft and shuttle, or needle. Oversees students as they learn the skill.
Weaving: Students can create their own board looms and shuttles from a solid mat board of foam core, or can buy ready made. In these samples I show both. Slice even slits into each end of a piece of mat board.
Make a shuttle by notching each end of a piece of mat board.
Wrap yarn around the notched ends of the shuttle.
Wind the warp yarn around the front and back of the weaving board to create evenly spaced increments through which to weave.
The process of weaving is to go over and under every second warp thread
Note how the second row is over and under the opposite warp yarn?
Slide these two rows right to the end and continue weaving all of the way to the top.
Here is a placemat in which the student used a hairy yarn at each end!
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