invaded by weavings!

This week I wanted to get the 3rd graders some practice with weaving as a process in art. We talk about warp and weft, over and under, and the alternating pattern found in most clothes.

We practice doing an AB pattern with cut paper a couple times, so they get a basic understanding of weaving and then I tell them to pull them apart because we are going to do something a little different...

I share the work of Invader, a street artist from Paris who puts up ceramic tile space invaders in cities all over the world. He visited San Diego a few years ago and posted over 20 of these creatures. We looked at some from his website and a surprising amount of kids had seen a few of them in different parts of downtown. I talk about how parts of Invader's tile work look as if they could have been done with the weaving technique we just practiced.

I then share how Kate Lilley has taken the same space invaders from the 80s and created some cool paper weaving versions of them.

From here, I let the kids create their own woven paper invaders. I leave Kate's examples up on the screen and I do a demonstration next to them, so students can see how to make small and large parts of color. I point out how some parts of the invaders are close to the AB pattern we practiced, but other parts do a lot of skipping over or under the warp to create solid bands of color or white.

Once students have their invaders woven, they glue the ends for stability and then cut off any extra lengths of their warps.