Artist: Carol Heft

Workshop: Mixed-Media Collage Book

Grade Level:  2  -   4  (adaptable for other ages)

Book: The Spider Weaver              
           by Margaret Musgrove
           Illustrated by Julia Cairns
           New York: Blue Sky Press (imprint of Scholastic, Inc.)
           2001

This workshop will explore the concept of "legend," oral history, and story development through pattern, drawing, and collage with fabric and paper using the books The Spider Weaver, by Maraget Musgrove, illustration by Julia Cairns, and Cooper's Tale, by Ralph da Costa Nunez as stimulus.

The Spider Weaver is a book about a beautiful spider that created a web so intricate and magnificent that the weaver of Ghana still tell the story today. The colorful patterns of this magnificent web were woven into a special fabric called Kente cloth. The patterns and colors of Kente cloth have a symbolic meaning. The beautiful illustrations and text use a variety of color, pattern, and metaphor to celebrate the legend.

Cooper's Tale is a storyabout a mouse who becomes homeless when the owner of the cheese shop he lived in was evicted. Some homeless children in a schoolyard befriend him and the story ends with Cooper reunited with the cheese store-owner who gives the homeless mother a job in the shop. The story is about feelings of loss, friendship, belonging and courage. The book was chosen for its child-centered language and approach to a sensitive social problem, and for its simple watercolor illustrations that depict urban life with pattern, shape, and interesting use of space (design). THe story is an example of a story that has a "shape" - in this case circular since, at the end, the main character finds his way back to the starting point.