Art Club Fundraising

Now that we are done with our mural, it's time for my art club to start working on making some money for their field trip at the end of the year!  When I was growing up, I was fascinated with boondoggle.  Don't know what boondoggle is?  How about plastic lacing...or gimp?  My dad and my grandma taught me how to make key chains and I used to make them and sell them on the bus when I was in elementary school!

When I started my art club, I knew that the previous teacher used to do bake sales to raise money for a field trip.  To me, that's not very artistic (especially since parents made the stuff to sell!), plus it's so hard to have a bake sale in NYS now because of health code stuff.  If it's not prepared in a school kitchen, you can't sell it anymore!  We charge anywhere from 25 cents (for the short, zipper pulls...the Kinders like buying these and can afford them) to $2.50 for the bracelets below.

If you don't know about boondoggle, or you need brushing up on it, check out the Boondoggle Man website.  His site is AWESOME.  He has videos as well as step-by-step pictures for just about EVERY boondoggle stitch possible.

Here are the items I'll be teaching my kids how to make on Wednesday when we get back from break.  They've been hounding me to learn how to do this, but it takes a bit to teach these and we needed to finish the mural.

The bottle tab bracelets are really popular bracelets.  They're so fun to make because you can change up the color of the laces and/or the color of the tabs if you have enough!  One of the teachers at my school brought me TWO gallon coffee cans filled with tabs of all sorts of different colors!

There are lots of different ways to make these bracelets.  I based my pattern off of a bracelet my brother got from a friend.  A lot of times people make a single layer of tabs, but these can actually hurt to wear because the rough side of the tab is against the skin.  I use two layers of tabs, back to back and off set just a bit.  When school starts back up and I have access to my tabs and boondoggle, I post a tutorial!

These are the other types of bracelets that are pretty popular.  These cuff bracelets use a thin piece of metal, usually aluminum strips.  You can find lots of tutorials on how to make these in boondoggle books from Michaels or JoAnns (that's where I got all these patterns from).

For my last share of this post, I will share my boondoggle cheat sheet that I have made to send home with my students.  Once they get the basic stitches down (box, brick wall, spiral and zig zag), I send them home with sheet.  These all came from the Boondoggle Man website.  I simplified the directions and added a picture so that the students can do the fancy key chains at home without me.  The fishy/ribbon is a very popular key chain.  Last year we made about 30 of these, charged $2 for them and then donated the money to one of the caner walks that a teacher was participating in.

Art Club & Art Fundraisers

Today I finalized my list for my after school art club and I will be beginning it next week!  How many of you do an art club and what kinds of projects do you do?

This is the third year I'm doing art club and this year, I'm going to really try and plan some good projects.  In the past, I have kind of "flown by the seat of my pants," but I need to start making this program a little more stable, reliable and advanced from regular art class.

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These are the two things we deifnitely do each year...the first is that we use boondoggle (plastic lacing) to create bracelets and key chains to sell to make money.  The teacher before me used to do bake sales, but to me, that doesn't really fit well with art (unless we were making creatively frosted items!).  Sooooo, I decided to have the kids do boondoggle fund raisers...we usually do 2-3 sales a year during lunch time.  We make a variety of sizes so the younger kids can afford them as well.  The range from 25 cents all the way up to $2.50 (bracelets).  As we start making these, I'll post pictures of our creations!  The kids get really into making big spiral and zig zag key chains and the metal cuff bracelets.

The other art project that is an art club staple is glass art.  The summer after my first year of teaching, I was able to use the extended day grant our school has to purchase a small glass kiln and supplies for fusing and slumping glass.  I always let everyone in my art club create a 6" glass plate to take home. We also use a microwave kiln to create glass jewelry or key chains.  (Last year we created jewelry for a silent auction to make money...it wasn't as successful as our fundraiser the first year, but we still did pretty good. A lot of people complained about how heavy the glass pendants were...) If you do any fundraising for your art club/art department, what do you do?

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This is what I tell parents about how I choose students for art club.  I come right out and tell them that I look for more advanced students in terms of artistic ability.  I look for mature students who are willing to come every Wednesday during the school year from November until the end of the year.  Students must be able to stay on top of their classwork and their homework.

Students will lose art club membership if they start doing poorly in class because they aren't completing homework. They will be asked to give up their spot if they continuously miss art club without a valid excuse (doctors appointment, family emergency, etc.), if they bully others, have inappropriate behavior on the late bus, and so on and so forth.  I usually have kids drop out before they get that far!

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The first year I did art club we did a major fund raising project at the end of the year the night of the art show. We spent about 4 days after school painting bowling pins to look like famous art.  This had to have been the BEST project ever!  The kids loved painting a weird object like a bowling pin, and they did a really nice job recreating famous art and understanding their artist's painting style!  You can head over to Artsonia to see everyone's bowling pins, but here are some examples! (These are all done by 5th and 6th graders...each bowling pin auctioned for at least $15-$20, the highest one went for $55! We made almost $900 by auctioning off almost 34 bowling pins...) Can you guess which artists they modeled these after?

Anyone have any suggestions to take better photos of sculptures?  I have a really poor set-up, not professional at all!  What I really need is a more professional camera for Christmas...hint hint hubby! ;)