Teaching young people to sew.

In my main job I am a Senior Youth Work Practitioner who runs Swanley Youth Hub.  As part of my work there I've been teaching the young people how to sew and creating art projects.  Back in June I got the young people to draw and colour designs onto fabric.  The theme was summer.  Its taken some time from the designs being done to completing the quilt, but we have.  Here is our quilt.

The white squares were not equal in size, so I would recommend that you measure the squares out equally before hand, rather than randomly cutting out squares.  This meant we've had to cut bits off the pictures when putting the strips of fabric in between. But for a first quilt, everyone at the youth centre are really pleased.  The quilt is hanging on a wall in the green room in the centre.

We made the designs on white squares cut from a white sheet bought from Asda.  The strips are made from a pink sheet from Asda and the backing and binding is made from a purple sheet from Asda.  Using sheets worked well considering we don't have money to buy standard price fabric.  We are about to start another quilt with the theme winter.  We are going to be using printable fabric for the designs and will use sheets again to make the strips, the backing and the binding.

Our other sewing project has been to learn how to use printable fabric.  We've printed pictures of ourselves on the fabric and turned them into cushions.  The cushions have all had lots of positive comments and lots of people want to be featured on their own cushions.

These are cushions using photos of staff.  I am the white cushion on the left.  The picture was taken using the special effects on the macbook we have at the centre.  Its certainly a different way of presenting photos, other than having them on the wall.  Our cushions are unique and personal to the youth centre.