More Artistic Interruptions of the Mind

Last week I showed you a couple of the distractions that I have been working on recently. Now, here are a couple more. The school at which I volunteer has an fundraising auction every year. Each homeroom class comes up with a project. And I have been also teaching art and have the students there working on projects as well. Last week, I revealed the Hand-carved Minion Soap set and the painted country glass set. This week, the other two projects from my art students!

The first project is an amazing chess set made by three of my students. I went to the hardware store and just grabbed a bunch of random nuts and bolts and told them to create a creative chess set. After working with them for a few class periods, they had figured out what else they needed and exactly what they wanted the chess set to look like. Then, they made all of their pieces, super glued them together and spray painted one set gold.

The chess board took a bit more creativity as they wanted it to be metal to go with the pieces, but they really wanted it to have a drawer to hold the pieces. They settled on a Keurig K-cup drawer, made to go under the Keurig coffee machine. They marked off the squares, spray painted them gold and Ta Da ...  A gorgeous Nuts & Bolts Chess Set!

I can't wait to see how it does at the auction!

I have a group of foreign exchange students from China in my class as well. They had several choices of projects to work on, but decided that they were going to make a traditional Chinese Mahjongg Set. This was a massive undertaking as they had 136 tiles to create. They chose to go with a wooden tile so they could wood burn the intricate designs. We got the wood pieces made from a listing on Etsy and then the kids set to the task. Each piece of wood needed to be sanded to give a softer feel and curved edge. Then the drawings were done and then finally, the wood burning was started. Luckily we were able to find a woodburning stamp for the circles to make the look clean. While it did take a bit longer than expected, the results were nothing short of amazing!

After the tiles were done, we had to figure an easy way for the game to be transported. Off to the craft store!! Currently there is always a large selection of giant empty books at all of the craft stores, and I have always thought they were very cool! So, I bought the biggest one I could find and it actually fit the tiles perfectly!

Absolutely awesome! I am very proud of all of my art class projects! I am looking forward to see how well they do at the auction, but even if they didn't make any money, I couldn't be happier with the hard work of my students!