Art Club 1.09: Costumes stage 1, headbands

THEME OF WEEK 1:09: Costumes stage 1, headbands

18th to 23rd March 2015

Art Club with Fundación Junto Con Los Niños - JUCONI 

facilitated by the Charlotte Miller Art Project in Guayaquil, Ecuador

IDEA AND AIMS:  For the children to create the first part of their costumes for their dance presentation on the day of the pop-up carnival float exhibition.  Emily and I have finally confirmed the involvement of two professional dance teachers, Thamára and Sofía, to come in and teach a dance choreography to the children in Socio Vivienda and Sergio Toral in April.  We've got approval of the budget signed off, with half the funds being covered by cmap and half by JUCONI, a total of $560 for 6 rehearsals and 2 presentations, involving 3 different groups.  

PROCESS: 

1. Whilst Emily prepared sheets of glitter paper by spray painting then gluing glitter onto large sheets of paper, I prepared the headband bases by first spraying a blue base colour on cardboard which I then guillotined into strips and stapled elastic onto at only one end.  We also decorated an example each. 

N.B. We had no time to gather reference imagery but discussed that if we had have it would have been good to print out photos of both boys and girls and men and women wearing carnival headdresses.  We heard a couple of comments from one boy in Sergio Toral that our facilitator examples were 'for girls' but in actual fact, all of the children made headbands and seemed to really enjoy themselves in the process, and there was no embarrassment from any of the boys in putting them on.

2. At the beginning of the workshops Emily and I were each armed with a stapler and measured the bands against the children's heads one-by-one, stapling the elastic in the correct place to fit to their head and cutting off any excess card or elastic. 

3. Facilitator demonstration of the steps of the activity.  

N.B. With Jonny we always wrote our a step-by-step instruction sheet.  Having noticed that it is not always necessary, we choose not to have one this week, hence the importance of the demo. 

4. The children decorate their headbands, first with tissue paper in a range of blues and silver, cut or ripped to the desired shape or size and stuck on with PVA mixed down with water, applied with a paintbrush.  Next they cut feather shapes out from the glitter paper, attaching these to their headbands with staples and adding a thin strip of wire along the back with masking tape to keep the feathers upright. The third step was adding a ribbon of turquoise sequins, secured with silicone and staples.  Some of the children in Sergio used their initiative and pulled the sequins off of the string to stick on separately, a tip we passed onto the kids in Socio.  In Socio Vivienda we also had a few additional materials, thanks to my brilliant Mum who sent me an Easter package that included sequins and sequin netting for our workshops.  The kids absolutely love decorative materials like these and it was impressive to see just how far the contents of the tiny box stretched!  Thanks Mum! :-)

MATERIALS: 2 x facilitator examples, pre-prepared glitter sheets in blue and gold, pre-prepared blue headbands with elastic attached, scissors, stapler and staples, felt pens, roll of turquoise sequin string, wire and wire cutters, masking tape, PVA and silicone, tissue papers in blues, silver and yellow, paintbrushes, bowls and water for mixing (and bonus materials in SV: sequins and sequin netting)

N.B. The restriction of colours to blue and yellow was a deliberate choice made after looking at different photos online of carnival processions in Brazil and Ecuador and noticing that the most effective children's costumes were colour themed.  The particular choice of yellow and blue was made by Emily as these are the colours that she associates with Socio Vivienda (interestingly the colours I would associate with Socio would be yellow and green and in Sergio green and red). 

In both sectors this was a definitely a very popular workshop, confirming our observations that the children love any activity involving a simple decorative process and particularly when it is for something that they can then wear!  Take a look at our cmap blog for some smiley-faced photos of our kids enjoying wearing their headbands.