Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Not exactly "High Art" . . rather "cute art" instead.

It's been 2 weeks since my last post. One week I spent relaxing on the gulf coast of Florida . . ahhhh. The rest of the time I spent assembling art projects made by 79 kindergartners. My fingers are sore!

As a fundraiser at my daughter's elementary school, each class is making an art project to be auctioned. I volunteered to do all  four of the kindergarten classes and came up with the idea of creating lampshades. Do you remember making shrinky-dinks back in the 70's & 80's? You draw on a piece of plastic, pop it in the oven and it shrinks to about 50% of it's original size.  It's so much fun . . . until of course,you've shrunk over 200 of them.  

Each child made 2 drawings on clear shrinky-dink tiles that I had pre-cut and punched holes in.  I shrunk them all down, assembled them with jump rings and attached them to a lampshade clip-top wire.  I then made a light diffuser by creating a cylinder of vellum which attached to the clip-top behind the shrinky-dinks. And voila!  You have 4 cool table lamps made from kindergarten art! They'll be auctioned off at A Girl Thing on March 23rd. It's a night of shopping, silent auctions, hors d'oeuvres, drinks and desserts. 

Click on the photo for a larger view.

I dropped them off at the school today so the kids could see the lamps before they are sold.  The kids were so excited trying to find their pictures on the shade.

Lamps with their lights on.

Now I hope they bring in lots of dough!  I need to come up with a starting price for each - what do you think it should be?