Cloth Lullaby : The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois
Feel like you can’t remember the last time that you sat down and read a book? Life is busy, filled with long to-do lists, and doesn’t often allow time for curling up in your favorite chair, and reading a book. Because the worst is when you start a book, get really really into it, and then, have to go to work , make dinner, clean, pay the bills, pick up the kids….
Children’s books don’t have to be just for children, and you don’t even need to have kids to read them. They’re packed full of information, plus they have pictures, and you can read them from start to finish in under 15 minutes.
Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois
The book is a story about Artist Louise Bourgeois, who is mainly known for her sculptures, especially her giant spiders, but she also drew, and late in her career created textiles. She grew up in a family that restored historic tapestries, and while she didn’t work with textiles until very late in her career, connections of weaving, webs, and needles can be found through her most famous works of spiders.
One of the reasons that I love reading and reading to students, is it spurs the imagination and makes us eager to create, explore and learn.
Some ideas to keep the learning going.
- connect to science to do some research about spiders
- Look up different types of spiders and practice drawing them
- Collect objects from around your home and create your now spider. Challenge yourself and see how long and thin you can make the legs, but still have the spider balance on it’s own.
- With string or thread, experiment with making your own spider web in the house or in nature.
- Look at Bourgeois’s textiles and drawings and create your own book or cloth book
- look at the clothes in your closet, and examine the different types of stitching that is used to create clothing. Notice how it makes different patterns and structures in your garments.
- Experiment with arm knitting or finger crocheting
