Patriotic School Project

 

My first grader had a school project where she got to choose a symbol of our country, then make some kind of representation of it in any medium and write a half-page report.  She chose the American flag, and I got to use my Silhouette Cameo once again to help with the project.  Hey, I have to sit through the tedious homework of 3 kids every day, so I should get to enjoy their projects when they come around. My Cameo loooves school projects!

This daughter really likes to sew with her sewing kit, so she jumped at the chance to make a flag out of fabric.  She wanted to make it a pillow, so we did.

I went to trace an image of the American Flag, then discovered that the Silhouette free weekly shape of a flag from several years ago is already perfectly proportioned, so just used that.  I used Silhouette sewable fabric interfacing on blue and white cotton fabric, and I used clear contact paper on top of red cotton fabric (and striped rainbow fabric for the back, which I forgot to take a picture of) to cut them exactly to size without messing with scissors.

I also cut a stencil out of Silhouette fabric-ink stencil vinyl to cover the blue fabric and let my daughter paint on the stars with white fabric ink.  She loved seeing her painting produce perfect stars once I peeled away the vinyl.

For safety’s sake I ironed all the stripes and the starry blue rectangle in place, then I let my daughter stitch them on to her heart’s content.  She got a little bored so we spread the stitching out over a couple of days, but she was so proud of herself when she had finished all that sewing!

In the end we ran out of time (and patience) for her to stitch all the way around the outside of the pillow, so I just zipped around it with a sewing machine.  She wrote her report on the American flag and got to put it on display with all her classmates’ projects.  Everyone got a first-place blue ribbon.

Related posts:
Fabric Flowers
Fabric Frenzy
Cutting Delicate Fabrics with your Silhouette