Shoofly quilt.

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Growing up, I always had a love for quilting. The combinations of colors and patterns were mesmerizing for me. I wanted to share my love of quilting with my first graders but making an entire quilt using fabric, needles, and thread seemed overwhelming. So I designed a lesson that would be manageable for my students to collaboratively create a successful class quilt.

A Brief History

Throughout history, quilts have played a very important role. They served not only as comfort and warmth on a chilly night, but also as a signal of safe housing on the Underground Railroad. Slaves who were trying to escape would use the different designs of quilts as a way to communicate without raising suspicion. Specific meanings were found within the design of each quilt. For instance, the shoofly quilt square, which my students recreated, represented a trusted person who would help in the slave's escape at a meeting point on the journey. There are many other quilt square designs that could be used. I chose this one based on its simplicity of a square and four triangles.

Opening the Lesson with a Story

I opened the lesson by reading aloud the book Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson. We then discussed slavery, the Underground Railroad, and the role quilts played. I showed students the shoofly design we would be making and explained its meaning. Each student was responsible for making one square to contribute to the class quilt.

Making a Paper Quilt Square

I gave each student a 9" square (23 cm) piece of colored construction paper for the background and three 3" (7.5 cm) squares of different colors of construction paper. Students cut two of the squares corner to corner to make a total of four triangles. The remaining square was used for the center of the design. Students first placed the small square in the middle of the background square, then placed the triangles at each corner of the middle square, and then glued all the pieces down.

We next added "stitching" to our quilt squares. Inside, around the edges of the middle square and four triangle pieces, we added small dashes, using a permanent fine-tip marker to make it look like we had sewn our pieces together. Then we drew designs on the pieces to make them resemble fabric using colored pencils and markers.

Finally, we discussed another form of quilting called "tacking," which is a kind of quilting that uses tied knots rather than stitches to hold together the layers of a quilt. We made our knots by cutting four short lengths of various colored yarns and tying each one into a knot. We glued one each in the center of the four squares that were formed on the background by our shoofly design.

After the quilt squares were finished, I combined them in the hallway to form one large class quilt. Each square was a masterpiece in its own right, but placed together, the result was a stunning array of color, pattern, and design.

Materials

* examples of shoofly and other quilt square designs

* 9" (23 cm) squares of colored construction paper

* 3" (7.5 cm) squares of colored construction paper

* scissors 

* glue

* black fine-tip permanent markers 

* crayons or colored markers

* colorful yarn

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students use visual structures and functions of art to communicate ideas.

WEB LINK

sheetmusic.berkeley.edu/courses/ is 182/papers/UGG/index.htm

Carrie Stevens is an art teacher at Odessa Kilpatrick Elementary School in Katy, Texas. [e-mail]