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Stumble It!

Put Your Best Faces Forward! part 2

Students and staff at Columbine Elementary School worked together on this project.

Everyone's creative abilities came into play, and everybody had a part in making the decorative canes and other clay pieces used in decorating the masks and in making the flower petal motifs.

To create those, students in Kindergarten, First and Second grades helped roll out sheets of white clay into foot long sections. Then everyone carefully placed hundreds of slices from the canes to fill in several entire sheets! Ends of all the canes that are removed before slicing the decorative pieces are combined to create a large and very colorful scrap pile.

Students got to play and experiment with this and also with some SculpeyIII clay donated by Polyform during some of their class times--and everyone decided they like using polymer clay!

Then all the scraps were combined and rolled out into more sheets. The decorated sheets were then placed on top of these, in order to make the entire thing thicker, and to also make it colorful, as some will be visible in the installation.

In order to press the decorative slices firmly into the clay, the entire thing is then passed again through a pasta machine's rollers and the caned images spread out and adhere firmly to the clay backing.

The sheets become longer as this happens--thats why the backing sheet was added, so that this sheet would not become too thin as they are rolled. Decorative rubber stamps donated by Uptown Design Co. and Colorbox Inks donated by Clearsnap are used to add even MORE color and pattern--and to fill in any spots left available.

To catch the light and the eye even further, aqua, purple and gold micro-fine glitters from The Art Institute Glitter are applied to the sheets.

Then cookie cutters are used just as they would be on dough--but these tools never cross over into kitchen food use. These decorative motifs have the designs created in all the original caning lessons and are all created in a pallete of the school colors too!

The flowers are reminiscent of a patchwork quilt made of many kinds and colors of textiles, joining to be something beautiful all by themselves AND together.

After baking the flowers are combined with bamboo stakes for stems, molded copper colored clay centers, and some felt "leaves" to create our garden of flowers. Other polymer clay flower cut-out flowers without stems and leaves will be used as a border around the atrium in the installation.

The students in Third, Fourth and Fifth grades each decorated a mask and so did the staff members.

Click on the teacher's name below to see a page with a picture of each student's mask.

To protect the privacy of the students their individual names are not displayed.

Third Grade

Mrs. Becker

Mrs. Bixby

Miss Durst

Miss Hanna

 Fourth Grade

Mrs. Eker

Mrs. Keil

 Fifth Grade

Mr. Foster

Mrs. Hernandez

Mrs. Streeter

 Click here to see the Staff's masks.

And here's the one I made along with some beads from the scraps left over. 

Here's a look at the "garden" we created!

As always happens, some changes occurred in our plans along the way--the students and staff got to KEEP their masks, and the permanent display at school has all the photos of the masks mounted on blue paper and framed on the wall. It took FOUR frames to hold them all! Its much easier to see the details in the masks that way...and lighter to hang. 


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Reproduction without permission is a violation of copyright law