Felted Wall-Hanging inspired by Monet's Waterlily Paintings- a fantastic School Project

This impressive felted wall hanging was made in a day by 24  four and five year olds (120cm W,  85cm H)

It’s great that I love working with children! 
One of my fun days last summer was working with 24 Reception/Year 1 children at Beech Street Primary School in Eccles (on the outskirts of Manchester). 

Teacher and School Arts Week Co-ordinator, Gill Douglas, contacted me and asked if I could help and of course I said yes! 

We decided that the children would make a wall hanging inspired by Monet’s waterlily paintings. 

Working in schools is interesting as there is always so much going on but often the logistics of fitting in and around things (like pirate parties and PE lessons) can be a challenge. Luckily for me Gill had left me with some fantastic staff who helped me to sort the children into smaller groups and to work out timings for bite sized chunks of felting throughout the day.

Working with six children at a time I gave them a simple introduction to Claude Monet. I had taken a selection of library books and had also printed off some relevant pictures. Even though the children were aged just 4 and 5 I really wanted to give them some interesting information and images of Monet. 

Well Monet had a BIG beard and he had a BIG garden! 

and he painted big paintings too!

Although I had photos of waterlilies I would really have loved to have been able to take a real waterlily flower into the classroom!

I explained that Monet was an artist who made his pictures with paint but we were going to make our wall hanging using colourful wool fibres. 
At this point it is always better to just get started with the physical act of felting. 

I had separated the wool fibres into greens for the waterlily leaves and pinks and purples for the flowers, so with each group we either made flowers or leaves. 

Wool fibres laid in a swirl; a simple way to make felted waterlily flowers

Softly felted waterlily flowers made by the children

We made lots of these flowers and leaves and laid them out ready for the afternoon. 

At lunchtime I got the classroom ready for making the big wall hanging so that as soon as my first group came back from their pirate party they were ready to go! I definitely wanted to make sure that every single child had taken part in every stage of the process.

Once the table was covered in a layer of white wool fibres we then changed to a pallet of blues and purples. This was fun as the children really do enjoy breaking the wool into small tufts. (This part of the felting process is called ‘laying-out’) and they were pretty impressed that we were working on such a large scale.

We used a range of blue coloured fibres to lay over the white layer (these were laid at right angles to the white layer). Now we had a ‘pond’ and next we had to decide where all of the waterlily flowers and leaves had to go. I showed the children Monet's waterlily paintings again as I felt it was important to remind them of what we were doing. The felting can all get a bit exciting  and I just wanted to remind them of the ‘big picture’ ie our Arts Week project.

One of Claude Monet's waterlily paintings

Again I feel that it is very important for the children to take ownership of their own art so I let them place the felted flowers and leaves on and then together we adjusted the position of some until we were happy with the composition. At this point I was really pleased that the teaching assistants felt happy to tell me their observations and they helped with the composition too.
Next I stood up on a chair and looked down at it to give the design a final check.

Once happy with this we got onto the big job of wetting, soaping, rubbing and rolling.

The laid out design completely wet and soaped with Olivia olive oil soap

Logistically this is the hardest bit of making a large collaborative piece of felt as there just isn’t space for 24 children to roll at once. 
Miss Morris, my fantastic teaching assistant, came to the rescue; as the children took turns with the rolling she and the rest of the children launched into a cavalcade of songs. They were absolutely fantastic and the singing made the rolling all so much easier and lots of fun, especially for me!

Rolling the wet and soaped design up in a bamboo mat

We stopped and admired our felt. Wow! There was no denying it, it was pretty impressive and all made by 24 children aged just 4 and 5.

Finished felted wall hanging (120cm W, 85cm H)
It is still damp here so would look even better once dry.

Before I left Beech Street school I hand-sewed a strip of cotton fabric onto the back of the top edge of the wall hanging. Then I threaded a length of dowelling through it and left it with two hooks ready for the school's brilliantly helpful janitor to hang up once it was dry.  

And finally how lovely to get this e mail from Gill Douglas, the School Arts Week Co-ordinator. 

"The work produced is fantastic and the wall hanging has already gone up! 
Thank you for your wonderful work & enthusiasm - everyone had a great, productive time!"

Wonderful Paul Klee inspired Felted Portraits by year 4 students

Felted portraits made by pupils in year 4 (8 and 9 year olds). Paul Klee was their inspiration.

‘Taking a line for a walk’ is an expression that everyone who has ever attended a college art class has heard, but up until recently I had no idea that it was Paul Klee who first coined the phrase.

One thing about doing activities for schools’ Arts Weeks is that you get the chance to do projects on new themes and also take inspiration from artists that you haven’t used before. I was delighted to be asked by Beech Street school, Eccles near Manchester, to run a day long session on Paul Klee for their year 4 pupils.

Paul Klee’s work is hard to categorise as his style was very broad ranging. My friend instantly thought of his goldfish painting but I was reminded of the postcard that I had on my wall a long time ago when I was a student up in Edinburgh. I actually saw the original painting in the flesh very recently too (see below).

Original painting by Paul Klee. In the Peggy Guggenheim museum, Venice.

So I decided to use Paul Klee’s portraits as the starting point for my felting workshop with the Year 4 pupils.

We started the day by talking about what we knew about Paul Klee; for example I told the children that he was a talented violinist and that throughout his life he still listened to music for at least an hour before starting to paint each day. We mentioned his illness and how that affected his paintings in later life - paintings towards the end of his life are done using darker colours and also have thicker dark lines in them - and we even managed to mention how much he loved cats.

I had taken various illustrated library books and these along with images sourced from the internet were helpful in giving the children an introduction to the artist.

We closed our eyes and did some taking a line for a walk exercises. At this point I wished that I had taken some atmospheric music with me to play as Paul Klee’s paintings were very influenced by his own emotions and music is a very useful way to arouse emotions in these sorts of drawing sessions.

The children did four ‘taking a line for a walk’ exercises and it was good to see how each person’s evolved as they became more relaxed and realised that there was no right answer. All that I asked was that they didn’t lift their pen from the page until we opened our eyes.

We did consider the shapes that the pen was making; spikey or smooth, looping or wavy, and as the children had their eyes closed they had to feel these movements rather than see them. 

I was happy for the children to use two pens at once, either in the same hand or one in each hand. It's always good fun!

Next we progressed onto laying out the wool fibres. I did a short demonstration to show them how to handle the merino wool fibres and we all laid out our first layer of unbleached wool tops. Then I demonstrated two methods of ‘drawing’ with wool fibres; one that was more suited to this portrait style (see below).

Paul Klee portrait alongside my felted example.

and another method that was appropriate to this portrait style.

Paul Klee painting alongside one of the pupil's designs. 

Dry wool fibres laid out before wetting.

In the afternoon the classroom was absolutely buzzing with activity and it was exciting to see how the pupils took what they had learned in the morning and absolutely ran with it. 

I had taken a limited pallet of colours, yellows, oranges, deep red, russet and a couple of greens. These had been selected as the majority of the portraits by Paul Klee were painted using these colours. The good thing about using a limited pallet of colours is that it avoided the felted portraits becoming completely multi-coloured and helped us to remember that we were thinking about the lines that we were making and also that this was about using felting as a medium but the work that we were making was still inspired by Paul Klee.

Each felted portrait is unique and not just felted but felted to a good standard. 

I love this one for the energy and personality that it manages to convey

This minimalist one uses no lines at all! 

And in this one there are more lines than facial features

I can feel Paul Klee's anger as he suffered from a very painful illness here. 

I was really fantastically impressed and pleased with the children’s achievements and it was brilliant as a visiting artist to get such enthusiastic comments and feedback from them all.
“This was our best day!”
“I love doing this!”
“When can we do it again?” 

The day went so well because all of the children were enjoying the variety of the activities in their School Arts Week and also because I had excellent support from the class teacher Miss Orr, teaching assistants and parent helpers. 

And a Janitor who helps you in with all your felting materials and equipment is always a hero!