When planning this activity for my Year 6 children, I wanted to take the children's felt-making to another level.
While I was keen to give the children experience with the technique of making felt, I also wanted to give them a creative opportunity to apply their visual arts skills to the completed piece of felt.
Earlier in the term, we had spent some time looking at Andy Warhol's work with famous faces, his work with colour, its balance and contrasts and his use of pattern, texture and line.
As a result, we decided to make our pieces of felt with the thought in mind that the finished piece would be a canvas for a mask.

Making the felt

Children chose their wool-top colours with their finished mask in mind. Although we had done some design and drawing work, I was careful to emphasize that the piece would evolve and the initial design would serve as a guide only.
After making the felt piece from Merino Wool-Tops - there are many books on the subject and Zart Art has excellent notes - we proceeded to add to our mask form.

Forming the mask shape

We used plastic mask forms and added scrunched and rolled paper and card with plastic (packaging) tape to alter the size, shape and features of the original form. This was rested on a large piece of plastic.
First we tried out our piece of felt on the altered mask form. How did it drape best, which side should we use, will the piece be big enough to crease and fold, will we push holes through for our eyes, mouth?
We made a solution of PVA and water (about half and half) and saturated our felt piece by dipping it into the container. Leaving the piece quite wet, we draped it over the mask form and had fun arranging, re-arranging, creasing, folding and finally leaving the wet piece to dry.

Decorating

I made a large collection of materials available for decoration.
We had looked at several books and posters and decided that we wanted a 'natural' look for our masks as opposed to a 'glitzy' look with lots of sequins and glitter.
We 'felt' that raffia, string, wool, more wool-tops, buttons, feathers, chenille stems, threads would make the most suitable decorative materials.
I was diligent in addressing the possible applications of each of the materials offered.
We discussed how we had used each in the past, its suitability to this application, the different ways it could be used, most suitable ways to adhere it to the mask, etc.

The children are used to using two or more decorative materials together, for example, a felt shape behind a painted half polyball, attached with small pieces of feather for an eye. They are used to sharing ideas and offering advice to each other on the choice of colour, material, suitable glue, etc. They have been encouraged to continually assess their work in progress and know when to stop rather than to continue to add decoration for decoration's sake. Conversely, they are encouraged to assess their work in progress and ask 'what more can I do?'

This activity was a great success with my Year 6 children. We worked for six weeks to make the felt and complete the mask. At the end of the project the children voiced a great sense of satisfaction with their work. They had excelled in their creative use of a wide variety of materials; they had been encouraged to think about their choices of colour, their use of pattern and texture, and their mix of contrasting and complementary colour to make a dynamic statement.

Copyright 2004 Zart Art & Zart Education Service