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| Did Bob Ross ever paint rocks? |
These books were all in the wholesale club back-to-school pile, and may be more indicative of what the kids were up to last year than this year. Rock painting is something to do, I guess. I don't recall ever doing it in school. Maybe in New York City they were afraid to let the kids have rocks small enough to throw.
It got me thinking about Craft Projects of My Youth, most of which were connected with elementary school. It's funny how some kids will take to one and not to another, how it's not always the kid you would think who excels at a particular craft. Here are the ones I remember, and my rating (from 0 to 5 yarn balls 🧶). Your mileage will certainly vary. I'd love to hear your take in comments.
🎨🖌🖇🧶
Paper crafts (corrugated paper edition): Cutting and gluing pictures using sheets of colored corrugated paper. You had to think ahead a little because your cut-out pieces had to have the same direction of corrugation as the background. Otherwise you might have a corrugated man running left-right when he should be up-down, so instead of walking he has to lie down. Lame. Only saved from 0 yarn balls because a classmate accused the school librarian of having corrugated lips, which is still funny. 🧶
Papier-mâché (puppet edition): Very intense exercise in using heavy conical dowels made of cardboard (a.k.a. yarn cones) as puppet bodies and making papier-mâché heads for them. The amount of wet newspaper in that classroom was amazing. The humidity level rose 30%. Later, the heads were painted and decorated with glued-on stuff, and little clothes were made for them. They were all Wizard of Oz themed, because we used the puppets for our class drama that year. I cannot begin to tell you how long we worked on this, but it seemed to be the whole school year. I memorized the entire script even though I had about five lines. As involving crafts go, it was amazing. As for the finished puppet heads, everything looked like blobs. Especially mine. Still: 🧶🧶🧶🧶🧶
Macrame (belt edition): Everyone in class had to have a macrame belt ready for the annual spring class dance at the end of the year. Not a school dance per se; each class had to do some kind of dance number. Our costume required us to make our own macrame belts. I don't want to say that I was bad at it, but a cat would have had a better chance at making a ball of yarn into a belt. In desperation the teacher asked the #1 macrame artist in the class to make my belt -- this little twerp, a jerk who would have been the class bully if he'd not been short, but as it was, was a loudmouth who could piss off anyone. He was a genius at macrame. Who knew? 🧶🧶
Stuff with Popsicle sticks (I have no idea edition): I just know there were tongue depressors and paint and glue. Nothing good ever came out of it. 🧶
Ceramics (painting edition): We got to pick our choice of unpainted ceramics to paint. When I say "our choice" I mean no choice at all, since we went by lottery. I got these little pine trees. Some kids got huge things with an opportunity to do some thoughtful and creative painting. I painted mine green. I am still disappointed, but on the other hand, I had those trees out every Christmas for decades. 🧶🧶
Tilework (glue edition): We got sheets of little tiles, cut them to shape, and glued them on other things. In theory, pretty cool; in practice, mosaics for morons. 🧶
Pottery (middle school edition): Now we're talking. Using the snake coil method to build up a pot, painting, firing, glazing! Kilns were involved! My pot still came out looking like crap--literal crap, as I painted it brown for some reason, and it was lumpy--but it was tons of fun. I still have it somewhere. It's heavy enough to kill a guy. 🧶🧶🧶🧶🧶
Knitting (adult edition): This actually was team-building project designed by people who did not know anything about knitting, because when you have twenty people knitting a square, even if they knew how to knit, every square is still going to be a different size because of variations among knot sizes, hand sizes, and general ability. Most people did not know how to knit. The dreamed-of goal of having a group crazy quilt was put to bed within the hour. I, of course, could not even make a good snarl. No improvement from my macrame belt fiasco. 0
That's all I can remember offhand. I am glad we didn't do origami. I think probably some kid would have lost a finger. I don't think our school turned out a lot of geniuses, is what I'm saying.
5 comments:
I once set my whole neighborhood on fire. (True story.)
Does that count?
My mother came out on the back porch wearing a Texaco Fire Chief fireman's helmet and directed all the fathers who were desperately trying to save their houses from the flames. Good times...
I did crafts at CYO Day Camp...we wove plastic lanyards (Great for keychains! And nothing else!) & painted plaster holy things (plaster poured into a mold of, say, the Virgin Mary's head). Useless time-wasters. One kinda cool thing in school was soaking string in flour & water, draping it over inflated balloons...then when the string was dry, you'd pop the balloon & have a semi-spherical lattice kind of...thing.
I don't remember doing any of those in grade school
rbj13
I recall we made paperweights out of resin, the stuff used to harden fiberglass. I forgot to bring anything to put in the paperweight so I had to use the Eisenhower dollar I got for my birthday. I may still have it but not sure where.
As kids, we learned how to sort of weave a few popsicle sticks together in such a way that when you threw the woven thingie at your sister or the cat, when it hit it would spring apart, throwing the popsicle sticks like shrapnel.
I'm concerned that this is becoming a lost art, I'm not sure if I could recreate the weave today, it only needed four or five sticks to construct one.
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