SMMART ART: Yarn Art

I saw a fun idea for yarn art on www.thatartistwoman.org and thought that we'd use this style of yarn art by the Huichol Mexican people for our spring art class...but we would do Yarn Eggs!

"Huichol art broadly groups the most traditional and most recent innovations in the folk art and handcrafts produced by the Huichol people, who live in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit in Mexico. The unifying factor of the work is the colorful decoration using symbols and designs which date back centuries. The most common and commercial successful products are “yarn paintings” and objects decorated with small commercially produced beads. Yarn paintings consist of commercial yarn pressed into boards coated with wax and resin and are derived from a ceremonial tablet called a nearika. The Huichol have a long history of beading, making the beads from clay, shells, corals, seeds and more and using them to make jewelry and to decorate bowls and other items. The “modern” beadwork usually consists of masks and wood sculptures covered in small, brightly colored commercial beads fastened with wax and resin." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huichol_art)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StringArt1MAPDF.JPG)

First cut out an egg shape from a cereal box.  You can paint the shape a pastel color for a nice background color.  Then use tacky glue and make a glue perimeter around the cardboard egg. 

Start to wrap pieces of egg colored yarn around and around...starting from the edge and all the way into the center.  Or you can lay down a yarn design across the egg horizontally and use a new color every so often for a striped egg.   We had precut strands of yarn for the art class.  This way, the yarn wasn't too long to handle and the students could use a variety of colors in their egg yarn art.

Now paint a backdrop for your yarn egg.  What setting would you paint?   A nest?  a grassy field?  a few chicks?

More tacky glue... and glue your yarn egg onto the backdrop.