Collaboration

Yay!! This month marks the first time I will have some of my work on display here in Juneau. As many of you know I work at an Assisted Living Home in Juneau providing services for adults with developmental delays. The house I work at is owned by Reach, who provides many different services throughout Juneau (as well as some in Haines) for people of all ages who have developmental delays. One of the more awesome departments at Reach is The Canvas. The Canvas is a gallery and day habilitation center located on the bottom floor of Reach. They provide art therapy for our clients, offer community art classes, have a pottery studio and operate a gallery which displays different artwork every month. It's a pretty cool place...

  This month the gallery is showing an exhibit (for lack of a better word) entitled Collaboration. Collaboration will be showcasing collaborative artwork created by Reach Clients and Staff. My coworker Reid and I have been hard at work this month working in tandem with each of our clients to create some artwork for the show. It has been both fun and challenging working with my clients to make some artwork together. As many of you know, I prefer to work in the fiber arts category, so naturally I chose to work with my clients to sew something awesome together.

   The idea for our pieces came from some place mats we also made this month.  We all were invited to an old coworkers wedding this past weekend and while thinking about what we could possibly get her for a gift, I came up with a much better idea - why not make a gift?? So I headed to the fabric store with my clients to pick up a few supplies...

      We decided to use the leftover scraps we had from Brooke's wedding gift to make some coaster's together. We had just enough scraps leftover for each client to make three coasters. I was really fun to work with my clients to put them together. They provided the art work for one side, and chose which scraps they wanted sewn together for the other side. I sewed them all up, turned them inside out and quilted them together for the final project...

One of my clients checking out some of her artwork at First Friday this last week.

 I then decided to hang all the coasters from a dowel rod so that both sides of the coasters could be displayed throughout the month. I am pretty happy with the final project and even more happy to have worked so hard to make something beautiful and useful with my clients. The exhibit will be up all this month so you should swing by and check it out because there really is some awesome artwork to be seen!! There is also some amazing artwork to be bought (I was very tempted to purchase a few pieces but resisted the temptation as all my excess money went to a new sewing machine). My clients and I decided to sell our coasters for $20. Whomever wants to buy them (there are three separate packs of four with each of my clients artwork on the back) can do so, all the proceeds will go to The Canvas and my clients.

The place mats we made for Brooke's Wedding gift to give you an idea of what the coasters look like because, like a champ, I neglected to take a photos of the coasters...