Recycled Art After School Program

I have been having a great time visiting the Banff After School Program on Monday's to teach Recycled Art to the students. There are usually 10-12 students aged 6-12 years old. It is a good mix of boys and girls and everyone is very enthusiast about the projects. I plan to post about it each week now that I am not so crazy busy but I will post about the last two projects here because I am bit behind. I am going to work with the program coordinator, Cheryl, to create a manual of our projects that can be used by other programs.



A few weeks ago we had a bunch of cardboard egg cartons to use up so I decided to have the kids make some little men sleeping in bed. Think The Seven Dwarves but we only made three.




And actually they turned out to be mice, ninjas, and every other little character the kids could think of. Very fun! You can see the instructions for this project here. It is one of many projects created by Alberta Egg Producers. In addition to using up egg cartons we put to use fabric remnants from old decorator books that were given to me by an interior design shop.


This week, since it is the week of Halloween, we made spider web paintings. I saw this once on a program called Mr. Maker, which my daughter watches, and I watch with just as much interest as she does. The show is made in the UK. Check out the website which has projects. For this project we used scrap matboard, which we put into a shallow metal tray. The kids picked a paint color, we used tempera, and I squirted a good sized circle of it in the middle of the matboard. Then, the kids took a marble and stuck it in the paint, then moving the tray back and forth and round and round, the marble rolled through the paint, leaving paint trails that made up a "web". While the web dried, the kids made spiders out of colored paper, markers, and googly eyes.





HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Catch Up

It is time to play catch up. So much going on in the creative realm lately, that I fall into bed at night exhausted. Sometimes I fall asleep putting my two year old to bed... sheesh!



First of all, there is a new babe in our family. My sister, Lisa, had a baby girl, Antonia Elisabeth Ray on Wednesday, September 24th. She will go by Nia is absolutely adorable, of course! She was due on September 6th, so way to take your time, Nia :)

On Monday, I taught my first Recycled Art Class for the Banff After School Club. It was a lot of fun! There were about 12 kids, from ages 6 - 9. We made collages from old books and matboard that were given to the program. I was surprised that the kids didn't know the word collage, since almost all kids perform the basic steps of cutting a gluing regularly. The kids were all enthusiastic and made vastly different compositions using vastly different design styles. I am not allowed to photograph the children for blog purposes, but I am allowed to photograph and blog about the work. I am looking forward to getting to know the kids and teachers of the program as the weeks go by. I brought my daughter with me, and while I may not always do that, she had a ball and fit right in with the young artists.


This is my absolute favorite collage. This little guy really listened to what I asked the kids to do. He took different pieces of paper and made them into something new.



This little guy's collage, the two program leaders, who are also women, and I, in stitches. We thought his mom would be very proud! PS He is not old enough to read :)


This is the collage that Quin and I worked on. She proudly held it in her stroller all the way home and has it displayed in her room.


I liked how this girl used the different scissors that were available to make new and different shapes from the paper.

I was going to post about more but it is off to bed for me... night night!

So Much To Do, So Darn Little Time...

I miss my blog. Things have been insane, all in a good way, aside from some colds around our house. I hope to have more time to write soon.

I have been editing photos from 17 photo shoots I had in Ottawa this summer. I am done with editing and uploading to online galleries, now I am working on building the albums for each of my clients. Here is just one of my favorite images from the shoots. What an adorably cheeky little lady!



In addition to that I am working two days a week at my friend's shop, Silver Spoon. It is an awesome job that I look forward to. I can bring my little one, since it is a children's shop, and the owner had a 3 year old of her own. His name is, of course, Silver. Here is a photo of two peas in a pod, hanging out at the shop. Admit it, you wanna ride an elephant, too :)



Aside from that, I have been preparing for my teaching my fall community courses, through the town of Banff. The first one started last Thursday night. It is Basic Digital Photography for ages 12 - 14. My class is small, all girls, and really fun. I forget sometimes how much I prefer to teach kids. Even the "difficult" ages most people dread. Kids are so much more open to new ways of thinking and seeing. And they are not as hard on themselves as adults. Adults let failure paralyze them. Kids just have fun experimenting. I hope to take some fun shots to share this week.

Next week, I am teaching a Lunch and Learn course to town of Banff Employees, on blogging. They have a public staff blog that they need help getting off the ground. I am going in to try to inspire everyone to give it a shot. I am looking forward to it.

I am also start teaching next Monday for the Banff After School Club. I will teach recycled art! Yippee! At one point I was to be teaching weekly but then sadly it was not in the program budget so it was changed to once a month. I was really sad so I mentioned to both the program coordinator for the program and the program coordinator for the Town that I would love to write for a grant, with their backing, to pay for my "position". They put their heads together and came up with a plan of their own that now has me teaching weekly, at least through the end of the year! On Monday we will make puzzles using old books that someone donated to the Club.

Lastly, I have been preparing for my upcoming solo show at the Banff Public Library, for the month of October. I will reveal more in upcoming posts but lets just say it involves Polaroid film and double exposures...

Awful, Wonderful Day

I was running behind this morning, as usual. To say my daughter and I aren't morning people is oh-so-truthful. I don't plan many things for the morning. On Monday, I was supposed to meet up with the coordinator of the Banff After School program, but my husband was home sick with a bug and my daughter was bit sluggish. In the end, she didn't get sick but we rescheduled our meeting for today, at 11 AM. No worries, right? Well, yes and no. We were ready to leave the house on time, but driving would probably have been a better idea than walking. Both in time factor and the fact that there were storm clouds brewing, something I only noticed once we were pretty far from home. I almost turned around but QQ wanted to "walk" (she was in the stroller)... so I pretty much ran, and I was pulling up to the Town Office pretty much on time. I started to gather all our bags and my child and then I noticed, MY PURSE WAS GONE!! It had been hanging off that thingy you hang your bags off of on a jogwger stroller. And now it was GONE. Of course, I am panicking, not sure if it fell off or, since I live in a densely populated tourist town this time of year, if it was stolen. I was completely frustrated that I was going to have to run and tell the person I was meeting that I needed to reschedule YET AGAIN. I ran in, put down my other bags, daughter on hip, not even able to remember the name of the person I needed to meet. There were about four people standing inside the door of the community services office and I blurted out, "I just lost my purse, I have to go." One woman, was like, "go,go!" and the person I was meeting who had at this point been identified, looked shocked. Then, I left. As I RAN back through all the steps I had taken I was feeling for the most part stupid. Stupid because I had been in such a rush, stupid because I had not taken the car (since I would have just throw my purse in), stupid because I know better than to hang my purse on the stroller when I can put it safely underneath the stroller, stupid because every time I try to do something work related lately I feel like I fail, stupid because maybe I was just an airhead and had left the purse in the house, or the garage, or on top of the car in the driveway, stupid because I had worn uncomfortable shoes with no socks and now my heels had blisters the size of quarters... I was huffing and puffing when I got home. No purse on the car or in the driveway, not in the front entry, upstairs, or the garage. Oh, I forgot to mention in between feeling stupid I was thinking, "oh no, my cell phone (which I had already replaced last fall because I put it on top of the car and drove away), my wallet, my $600 Leica Point and Shoot digicam that I bought myself for Christmas after wanting it for two years, my little notebooks with all my ideas, notes, designs.... gone, all gone! I hate owning things I can't do without but I guess to some extent that is inevitable. We need wallets, I am a photographer so I need a camera, and well, cell phones... No purse at home, at least I was not an airhead. I called my cell phone, no answer and more importantly I could not hear it ringing in the house. I called my husband to tell him the whole story. I called my credit card company and my US debit card to place blocks on the accounts. I called the woman who I still needed to meet with to reschedule and apologize. Andre, my husband, called the Town to find out where I should file a missing purse report, which conveniently happens to be at the Town Office, where I was now headed back to for my meeting. As I got in the car it dawned on me that I had ALMOST put my house and car keys in my purse but had handed them to my daughter instead, otherwise we would not have gotten into the house and could not now drive the car. A-ha, things COULD be worse. And my two year old had actually been really really extra good while I was making all of these phone calls, since she knew I was distraught. I drove to the Town Office, had a great meeting while QQ played on the floor in their box of toys. Good news is, I am going to be the local artist who comes in to teach the Recycled Art Project for the After School Program, one Monday a month, starting in Setember. Yippee! I am very excited about that! Ok, off to file a missing purse report, and then we went to the PO, Nester's Local Grocery, the Parks Administration Building, and the OH Canada Museum to see if anyone had turned my purse in. Nope. But, I did make 6 Polaroid Spectra double exposures for my October exhibit during the course of all this craziness. I figured why not since we were visiting all these local places, which are a big part of the subject matter of my exhibit. Are you starting to see the theme of my day, Awful, Wonderful? All day it was bitter sweet. Well, ok, not all day. It was exactly 2 1/2 hours from the time that I lost my purse to the time I returned home to hear Andre on our voice mail telling me he had found my purse by calling my cell phone every five minutes until someone picked up. It was at the coffee shop next to the post office and he was on his way to get it!!! OH, yeah! No more thoughts of applying for a replacement health card, driver's license, debit card, etc etc etc. I just had a feeling it was all still in my purse. And I was getting a warm fuzzy feeling about how I knew that someone would do the right thing (ok, I didn't know, I had my doubts, but I was hoping...) and how great that is! Andre came home, all was in my purse, and he told me that someone had turned it in and how nice the people who had it were and I felt like I am right to think the best of my fellow man. Breathe. Deep breath... get on with the rest of the day. Call and take the block off the cards, have lunch, get Etsy trade and client CD ready for the post office, drive to Canmore, go to thrift store, find house plant (yippee!) and some terracotta pots for after school program, as well as some chipped pottery destined for recycling to use for my kitchen back splash, QQ & I see chiropractor, pick up snapshots at photo lab from our Ottawa trip, go to post office, drive home, Q nap, edit client session, meet friends visiting on a whim from Vancouver for dinner, grab Starbucks, home, get friends settled for 4 day stay, have a glass of wine, package another Etsy order, sit and chat, put Q to bed, upload portrait client session to the web. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!