Commonwealth Weaving

Last year I was asked by North Ayshire Council if I would be interested in working with schools to create a handwoven project based on sports activities that could be link to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. As I thought this would be a great opportunity, and good fun, I said “yes”.
For the past 3 weeks I have been doing my first project with a North Ayrshire school, Towerlands Primary in Irvine.
This involved working with Barry West, a Healthy Start Officer from North Ayrshire Council, who set up a series of activities for the pupils to do. The children recorded their scores and then I created patterns that would use those scores and activities to make banners. The banners would then be displayed in the school, and then hopefully in their new school when they transfer to it after the summer holidays.
Week 1 was the sports activities. All the children got involved and had a healthy competitive attitude to it all.

The all had a great time and the scores made me have to put on my thinking hat to figure out how to translate it into weaving.

I did manage to do this, so for the last two weeks the pupils then started to weave their results in their teams. I chose simple patterns and showed the children the techniques and left them to dive into the yarn and create their own patterns. Each loom had the same central colours in the warp, the school colours, and then the edges were for their team colours.

Twisting with raffia

Bumpy floats

Two colours at once

Adding fibre

The kids really loved the vibrant colours and each group adapted each technique in their own unique way.

By the end of the third week we finally had the banners.

Handwoven banners

You can definitely see the difference between each team, and they do show four of the sports that they did on the first week.

We all had a great time and thanks to everyone at Towerlands Primary and North Ayrshire Council for letting me get more kids weaving.