Three Looms for Art Camp

My my, look what the cat just drug in! Three baby Dick Blick Artcraft looms that had been collecting dust in a storeroom at the Aiken Center for the Arts for the last few years. 

The Art Center staff would like to use them in their summer art camp program in July and asked if I could help them out by setting up the looms. (I'm thinking, how cool is this, I get to drag three old looms home to play with and maybe even sneak into summer art camp for a few days, pinch me!) First order of business is to knock off some dust & rust, these baby's are pretty nasty right now.

Second order of business is getting some feed back on what kind of projects the kids (~ 6 to 10 years old) might be weaving and how to set up the warps. One of the looms was set up for weaving a red, white & blue book mark with ~ 20/2 cotton. I'm thinking it would take at least a couple of hours to do (attention span issues), any glitches or goofs would be pretty obvious and, I'm not sure how excited 8 year olds are going to be about book marks in general.  

I'm going to propose setting up the looms to make mug rugs. They may not sound too exciting either, but I think they allow a lot more creative freedom along the way. The kids could use almost anything for weft - lots of creative options, stick in some fur or a few feathers. And, it takes less than 20 minutes of weaving time - they can make several, all different, each exploring and experimenting with what they learned on the last one. Acquiring and preparing an interesting array of rag strips could be an adventure in itself. 

My inspiration to go down the mug rug path came most directly from an Sept/Oct/86 issue of Handwoven Magazine. Jean Scorgie uses a clasped weft technique to make her Southwest Collection of mug rugs and a table runner. Her drafts were recently reissued in one of the Best of Handwoven collections titled Weaving with Rags. I'd first picked up on the clasped weft trick in Peter Collingwood's Rug Techniques book and had used it to make a pretty neat kitchen towel out of P&C cotton. If I can do it, I'm betting a 10 year old could too, maybe we'll find out.