"Art can impact the social context of family dislocations and can serve as a powerful tool in encouraging an open national dialogue about Zero Tolerance in our country"
So (sew) America Cares is a participatory social art project with a commitment to raise awareness about the lives of the children separated from their parents at the border. All the faces stitched together strengthen the very fabric of our own society.
In 2018 a Zero Tolerance immigration policy was announced, requiring that all families who cross the border shall not only be separated but also charged in federal court with the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry.
This Project’s mission is to advocate for these children and to extend an invitation to anyone who would like to participate. Thread by thread, fiber by fiber, a participating community will increase its understanding of the circumstances of these children who never asked to be illegal aliens. The project consists of 10 different faces that will be repeated 100 times each to add 1000 faces. The faces had been laser etched on raw canvas to allow the participant to use any kind of thread, yarn, wool, fabric, paint etc. So (sew) America Cares has a plan: to "sew" them back, to never allow these children to be lost again, to create a quilt of 1000 faces representing a portion of these children.
We cannot allow these traumatized children to disappear and in time, be forgotten.People are encouraged to stitch, sew, knit, knot, crochet, embroider, or braid these drawings so as to symbolically recover these children’s faces and lives again.
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So (sew) America Cares is an international call for people to participate and raise awareness as to the consequences of this immigration policy and its devastating effect on children. As citizen, artist, mother and a child that suffered being separated from my family for eight years, I am concerned about the hundreds of separated children across our country.
Play Studio Artelier
OPEN STUDIO
The Studio Classes grants use of all studio facilities equipment. All techniques are adapted to Skill Level 1, 2, and 3.
All classes include supplies, each workshop lasts 2 hours, time and day can be arranged.
Block Printing
In this course, students will learn the basics of Block Printing on paper and fabric. Students will learn carving techniques for rubber blocks, linoleum plates and wood blocks, how to print using dye pastes and inks, design fundamentals and how to create a repeat, and how to create multi-color prints.
Textile Illustration
Students will design their own pattern to create their own fabric, which is going to be digitally printed on cotton.
Fabric Painting
Silk painting produces beautiful results and allows for a lot of creative freedom – like a water-color painting on fabric. In this class, students will learn and explore silk painting techniques using dyes and different resists.
Machine Embroidery
Students will learn the essential skills of sewing: how to use a sewing machine, basic pattern reading and sewing construction while creating a simple project
Weaving
Students will learn the principles of hand-weaving on a 4 harness floor loom, including how to wind your own warp, dress the loom, and explore basic weave structures— plain weave, basket weave, ribs and twills.
Draw, Sew, Sculpt
Draw, doddle and colored your own figure, then make a pattern and make a stuffie from your own design.
Dye cotton fabric
Students will experiment dying fabric with cold pigments and fixatives on dry fabric. This technique better suits for contour lines and negative spaces, also allowing the pigments to blend without loosing the line of the drawing.
Transfer on Fabric
Students will learn how to make a gel medium transfer to apply to a variety of textiles textures. Also students will be challenge to use transfers to collage on fabric. We will also learn how to make b/w and colored transfers from Xerox copies with thinners on a press.
Eco Flower Dyes
The colors found in nature, in flowers, plants, and vegetables are so much more vibrant and beautiful. Students will experiment with natural dyes, such as flowers and plants.
Silk Screen
Students will be taken through the basics of screen-printing on both fabric and paper. You'll learn to coat and expose a screen using photo-emulsion and an exposure unit, how to print with water based inks, the basic principles of color registration and make beautiful prints.
Patch Work
You will learn the starter basics of cutting and piecing, machine quilting (with our stellar walking feet!) and binding. It is a very manageable quilt size and completed during the class so you walk away with a lovely finished quilt AND the skills to take on more projects.
Batik
It is a technique to apply patterns of different colours to cloth by dyeing in several stages and by applying wax after each stage to protect areas of unwanted colour. With origins in China, India and Japan.
Embroidery on Paper
Students will learn all the possibilities to work with cotton paper. Students will apply various textile techniques to hand made paper. We will experiment manipulate paper as it was fabric.
Knitting
Students will use knitting to collage or add as texture. Combined knitting to different textile tecniques to add more value to what is consider a craft. Students will experiment knitting with non-conventional materials like wire or natural fibers.
Stitching & Collaging
On raw canvas students will create a composition usinfg different fabric patterns. You will approach collaging on paper to textile and applied layers to create backfround to forground, also drawing with the sewing machine.
Needle Weaving
Needle weaving in hand embroidery involves all kinds of stitches. Woven picot, woven wheel, various interlaced stitches – these are both examples of stitches that involve “needle weaving.”
Silk Screen, illustration
Students will be able to adapt an image of their choice and make a silk screen (mesh) that can be printed onto different surfaces and textures. Using drawing fluid to get their image on the screen and later block out ink to create the negative space onto the screen, students will understand the versatile effect of this technique to make patterns on fabric.
Punch Needle
Needle punching is a craft or art technique of looping yarn, floss or ribbon in the format of a pattern through fabric. The looping gives the pattern a rug like appearance.
Dyeing on Fabric/Paper
Students will learn the basics of dyeing fabric using natural materials, including natural dye sources, how to extract colors, what mordants are, and how to use them to fix color.
Hand Embroidery
Students learn traditional embroidery stitches as well as develop their own way of drawing with thread. Students will be introduced to a variety of ways of creating lines and textures on cloth and image transferring techniques. Students will leave with their first embroidery sampler and an embroidery hoop to continue practicing.
Photo embroidery
Bring your dearest photographs and make one of a kind art piece with it, you will be able to use all kinds of different tecniques to it and stretch it on canvas.
Beading on Fabric
Learn a variety of bead embroidery techniques using mostly small glass seed beads. Apply these beading stitches alone or in combination as you interpret and adapt design cues from a commercial large print fabric. Explore your creativity as you turn printed fabric into beautiful textile art.
Felting, dry needle
As one of the oldest fiber techniques, the student is going to be able to create an image by using pure silk thread on a raw canvas free forming the image and using a wide variety of shades to create values.
Hand Embroidery
Cotton Paper
Create patterns on paper and embroider it, using the grid embroidery system to understand all stitching possibilities to create patterns using thread.
Fiber Sculpture
Students will create a sculpture made using cloth, foam rubber, plastic, paper, fibres and similar material that are supple and nonrigid. You will have a pattern to start the sculpture but can add more parts to the sculpture as you might need to.
Explore Experiment
Embroider
Through drawing and painting we will investigate different subject matter in the development of a personal vision and point of view to create meaningful and moving work.
Tuffting
Tufting is a type of textile weaving in which a thread is inserted on a primary base. It is an ancient technique for making rugs.