Industrial Occupations for Pattern Weaving on Art Burlap MABEL BROWNING SOPER, Director of Drawing and Manual Training, Wellesley, Mass. FTEN-TIMES, if Industrial Work is new, or if there are large numbers of children to teach, weaving on looms made by the children seems a difficult undertaking. If taken step by step, first as construction, then as design, and last as hand work, it is really an easy and simple problem. However, a good substitute for loom weaving and one which simplifies the process a great deal is that of weaving over burlap warp threads, the woof of which has been drawn out to make place for the weaving. This method of weaving is also a good change from loom weaving after several years of teaching the latter, and it offers a better opportunity for pattern weaving, because since the process of weaving is shorter, more time can be given to teaching the working out of the patterns, which are original designs made by the children. Art burlap which comes in good colors is used. It can be purchased at the upholstery department of any large department store. For the weaving, single ply jute cord of natural color is the most appropriate, as it is the same material with which the burlap is made. Tape needles are used for the over and under weaving, or darning, as in this case the process might be called. The simplest articles which can be made are mats like that shown in the illustration, Fig. 3. Other articles which delight the children are little school-bags with braided jute Fig. 3 A very important part of the problem is the designing of a pattern which can be woven. For this purpose" plottingpaper," which can be purchased at art stores, or paper on which lines making one quarter inch square have been ruled, must be used. The patterns are composed of horizontal lines and spaces of different lengths representing the threads to be woven. The best way we have found to teach pattern designing is first to draw one or two patterns on the blackboard, copying those illustrated in Fig. 1, perhaps, and have the children read them in this way. First row - under three, over one, etc. Second row Third row over three, under one, etc. over one, under one, over one, etc. In this way the children get the "rhythm" of the pattern, and are introduced to one of the most important principles governing good design. The more rhythmic or "sing song" they are taught to read them the better. After they get the idea of a pattern which.can be woven, they can be given a chance to make an original one or several different ones and the best two or three can be selected, copied on the blackboard and woven into the burlap. One of our teachers used the good method of having all the children in one row weave the same pattern, each row having a different one. All were designed by the children, as were these shown in the illustrations. In the third illustration is shown both sides of the same pattern. To make the mats a piece of burlap 83 inches by 9 inches was used. The first thread for the pattern was drawn 1 inches in from each edge and three threads of burlap were allowed for one stitch represented on the squared paper by one block; so that the first row of the first pattern reads: over nine threads, under three threads, etc., repeated three times before the second row is woven. Two threads can be allowed instead of three, if finer weaving is desired. The mat was finished on the edge by drawing the threads for a fringe inch wide. The Story of the Little Half (Retold From Lang's "Blue Fairy Book") NCE upon a time there was a black Spanish hen. She sat on thirteen white eggs, and waited, and waited, and waited. Bye and bye, twelve of the dearest, yellowest, fluffiest little chickens came out. But there was one egg that would not hatch out at firstnot till a day or two after the rest, then instead of being a little yellow chicken like the others, it was only half a chicken, and black as a crow. It had only one little eye, and one little wing, half a bill, and only one little leg. So it couldn't run around like the other little chickens, but had to go hopity-kick, hopity-kick, all the time. Now half the time it was a good little chicken, and half the time it was a very bad little chicken. One day, when it was a very bad little chicken, it came hopity-kick, hopity-kick, right across the barnyard and up to its mother, and said, "I'm not going to stay here any longer, I'm going to Madrid to see the king." "Cluck! cluck! cut-dah-cut," cried his mother; "you mustn't do that." "Yes, I will," said the little half chick.. "I'm not going to stay here any longer with you. I'm going to Madrid to see the king," and hopity-kick, hopity-kick, off he went; out the barnyard gate, hopity-kick, hopity kick, down the road, hopity-kick, hopity-kick, hopity kick, through the woods, until he came to a fire. Now the fire was all choked up and called out to the little half chicken, "Little half chicken, little half chicken, won't you come and help me? Won't you bring me, with your little half bill, some sticks and twigs, so that my fire will burn brighter? And the little half chicken, who was still very bad, said "No, I will not, I haven't any time to stay to help you. I'm going to Madrid to see the king." And on he went, hopity-kick, hopity-kick, hopity-kick, over the hills, and hopity-kick, hopity-kick, through the meadows, until he came to a little brook. The little brook called out, "Little half chicken, little half chicken, won't you come and help me? Won't you come and clear away some of the sticks and stones with your little half bill, so that my water may run swiftly and gaily along?" And the little half chicken, who was still very bad, said, “No, I will not, I haven't any time to stay and help you, I'm going to Madrid to see the king." And on he went, hopitykick, hopity-kick, hopity-kick, through the woods and fields, and hopity-kick, hopity-kick, hopity-kick, on and on, until he came to the strangest thing. What do you suppose it was? The wind, caught in a bramble bush. "Oh-o-o-o-o, little half chicken, little half chicken," moaned the wind, "won't you come and help me-e-e-e-e? And the little half chicken, who was still very bad, said, “No, I will not, I haven't any time to stay and help you. I'm going to Madrid to see the king." And hopity-kick, hopity-kick, on, and on, and on, he went until he came to Madrid, and hopity-kick, hopity-kick, up through the courtyard of the king's palace, and round the courtyard to the kitchen, where the cook was looking out of the window. Now the king had said that he wanted chicken for his breakfast, and there wasn't a chicken to be had in all Madrid. "Half a chicken is better than none," said the cook, and she seized the poor little half chicken and put him in a pot of water on the stove. The water nearly covered the little half chicken, and almost drowned him. "Oh, water! water! said he, "you mustn't do that! why, water! I can't stand it." "Oh! little half chicken, little half chicken," said the water, "when I was in trouble, and called you, you wouldn't help me, and I can't help you now." Then the fire began to make the water hot, and the little half chicken was almost burnt. "Oh, fire, fire!" he called out, "you mustn't do that! why, fire! I can't stand it." "Oh, little half chicken, little half chicken," said the fire, "when I was in trouble and called you, you woudn't help me, and I can't help you now." Just then the cook thought she would look in and see how the chicken was doing. She opened the cover and saw that the half chicken was black as a crow. "The king will never eat that," said she, so she took the chicken out of the pot, and threw him out of the window and right onto the courtyard. And the poor little half chick was most drowned, and most burnt up, and he couldn't even go hopity-kick any longer. Just then came the wind and blew the little half chicken right up into the air. "Wind! screamed the little half chick, oh, wind! you mustn't do that! why, wind! I can't stand it." "O-0-0-0-0!" sighed the wind. "Little half chicken, little half chicken, when I was in trouble and called you to help me, you wouldn't come, and I can't help you now-ow-ow." And the wind blew the little half chicken higher and higher, up and up, until he blew him right on top of the tall church steeple and there he has been ever since. Some day, children, when you go out, look for him. You will see him standing on his one little leg, with only one wing and one eye - a little weather vane! (This is a popular story for little children. Will teachers tell me just what they think about giving it to the little ones? What can be said for and against it?-THE EDITOR) The Protection of Winter Buds A very common misconception has gained currency concerning the purpose of certain structures in winter buds. It is very pretty poetry to speak of the "baby plant, snugly wrapped in its warm blanket to keep it from freezing!" but anyone may readily demonstrate the fallacy of the idea on any winter's day when the temperature is below freezing. If horse-chestnut or other buds are cut open on such a day they will be found packed with ice and the bud itself frozen. Evidently the "warm blanket " must serve some other purpose than the prevention of freezing. What is this purpose? It is a well-known fact that frozen plants may frequently be saved by allowing them to thaw while immersed in water. Loss of turgor does not then take place and the freezing is not fatal. Similar factors are involved in the ecology of winter buds. When a cell is reduced to the freezing temperature water leaves the cell and solidifies in ice crystals outside the cell wall. If the cell or cellular tissue is freely exposed to the air the water evaporates when a rise of temperature melts the ice. Plasmolysis thus becomes permanent and the frozen tissue dies. The protection afforded by the bud coverings prevents evaporation when the ice melts, the water is then reabsorbed by the cells, turgor is regained, and thus the bud may safely experience several freezings and thawings.-C. S. G. in The Plant World Among the number of notes received by a teacher in excuse for the absence of children was the following: "Dear Teacher, -Kindly excuse Minnie for having been absent yesterday, as she fell in the mud on her way to school. By doing the same you will oblige her mother." L The Polar Zones* WALTER J. KENYON, State Normal School, San Francisco EARN to pick out of a picture the portion of it that answers your purpose. The children's supplementary readers are filled with just the material needed for blackboard illustration. Your story or your geography lesson is helped immensely by a blackboard drawing, however crude. It is not so much a question of skill as a question of habit. Get into the habit of drawing on the board. A sketch put on during the absence of the pupils is better than none at all. But a good picture, produced in this way, is not so effective as a cruder one, done while you talk. The charm of the drawing lies in its being hot from the hand, and in a spontaneous relation to what you happen to be saying. This work shown in the illustrations is mass drawing. It is easier to do than outline drawing. The latter sets you a more specific task and uncharitably reveals every vagueness in your mental image. Not so with the mass work. You can begin in the middle and feel your way to the general shape you have in mind, and you are bound to approximate the form you started to draw. Then the second step is to go over the parts that would catch the light and retouch them with crisp, spicy strokes. In this mass drawing it is best to break off a piece of chalk not more than an inch long and work with the side of itnever with the end, except for a line or a very narrow light. It is not within the range of this article to print any sample "stories." Such material is to be found in abundance in such every-day books as "Children of The Cold," "Hans the Eskimo," "Seven Little Sisters," or Miss Smith's excellent little reader, "Eskimo Stories." We are concerned here more particularly with the drawing of the pictures. We have tried, in the variety of these, to cover the essential phases of life in the frigid zones, including animals, Eskimos, Lapps, and the penguins of the south polar region. Fig. 6 Lapps on their skees * Copyright, 1905, by W. J. Kenyon. In telling generally of the cold zones, of icebergs and floes, and trackless wastes of snow, Fig 1 is a good sketch to draw. Don't start out resolved to draw it all, but sketch something of an iceberg, when you happen to be describing one. And add other things to your sketch as fancy leads you on. Be content to be crude, and cast all thoughts of skill to the winds. If you want a ship in your sketch it can be put on in white just as well; or if you like black better, first rub in a gray sky and iceberg background and then touch the vessel in with charcoal. Notice that the only problem dealt with in the whole sketch is the play of white against black. For the ice forms just put in gray masses of almost any shape, and then touch them up with stronger strokes for the lights. Use Fig. 2 in the same informal way, appropriating such part of it as may meet the needs of your story. For example, you may start out on a description of the igloo without any intention of drawing either dog, team or aurora. But if the story passes on to these features they will naturally drift into your picture. The best way is to start out without determining beforehand how far you will carry your sketch. Then the drawing will not get in the way of the story. This is as it should be. It should not be a story for the drawing's sake, but quite the contrary. The aurora, by the way, is the easiest thing that can be drawn, since it is hardly possible to draw it incorrectly. Travellers describe it as ever changing in its form and color and of infinite variety. In only one aspect does it remain, constant: It is light. In the extreme northern latitudes it hangs down from the sky in vast fringes, or curtains, waving, advancing, receding. In the lower latitudes its core lies below the horizon and only upward streamers are seen. Try to draw the igloo without outlining it. Just a gray patch begun anywhere. Afterwards a few lines marking out the ice-blocks of which it is made. Don't draw these lines too continuously or too strong. Remember that the igloo is a little way off, where details become indistinct. Not so with the dog-team. Here is the immediate foreground, and the details may be as sharp-cut as you please. Draw the nearest dog as well as you can and don't bother much over the others. Just gray patches will do. As to the sledge, since it may bear any sort of a load, a gray mass of any shape will do. Then add the runners and backand let the driver's head loom up out of the load. After that add a few sharp touches of light where the lights would fall. In Figs. 3, 4, 5, and 6 the main problem is texture. Try to show, by the stroke of your chalk, whether it is the velvet covering of the seal, the shaggy bear-skin of the boy's tuniic or the bushy bristles of the dog's Fig. 9 tail. Also notice, in Fig. 3, that it is the intensity of stroke (coupled with size of object), that makes the boy look nearer than the igloo. The same problem of texture comes up in the other animal pictures. In Fig. 11 we have the extreme shagginess of the polar bear and in 8 the comparative smoothness of the deer's hide; while the wolves and the seals and walrus present still other textures. The penguins are weird birds that stand, erect and manlike, in great assemblages along the Antarctic shores. Be careful not to associate them in the pupil's mind with Arctic scenery. No Eskimo has ever seen a penguin. An important point to notice, in all the sketches, is the undershadow. In Fig. 6, for example, notice that the Lapp's bulging trousers cast a narrow, but very positive, shadow on the boot. In a similar way a like shadow is thrown on the trousers by the frock of the coat; and again, the bulging of the coat just above the belt casts this same narrow but insistent shadow on the latter. One difference between good and bad mass drawings is that the tyro is apt to overlook this inconspicuous but very essential under-shadow. It is simply secured by leaving the board vacant in the right place. Or if you forget to do this, the under-shadow may be touched in with charcoal. A skilful hand can use the eraser to the same end, but the beginner will more likely in this way produce straight, mechanical bands of black that give little feeling of reality. This all-important under-shadow is cast on the face, by the hood, in Figs. 2 and 5; and by the hair in Fig. 3. The tunnel of the igloo, in Fig. 2, exhibits this shadow, in one of its variations. Find it behind the reindeer's collar in Fig. 8. The yawning cave in the iceberg, Fig. 1, is really another variation of this same under-shadow. Wherever an object or a part of an object is imposed upon another, it will catch a light and cast a shadow. It is at least half of your problem, in learning to draw, to habitually and automatically see this light and this shadow in their never-failing juxtaposition. Now, having fixed this light-and-shade relation in your mind, look for its more subtle play in the animal forms. In all of them notice a decrease of light on the under side of the body and an increase on the back. Only in the more distant objects does this contrast wholly disappear. When is the Teacher's Work Finished? T A. C. SCAMMELL HERE comes a day to many a teacher who has seen long service, when she sorrowfully realizes that two of her best assistants, mental springiness and grip, have left her for alway; when her nerves, once her obedient servants, have become her masters. In her helplessness, born of failing strength, she hears the not uncertain call to come away and she responds at first summons. She has been honorably discharged. A home call, tenderer, because of nearer kin than any common service, may decide the teacher to give up her school-work. Or, she may have a "call" to quite a different public work; she surely will have if her angle of vision so changes that she can see her way across obstacles to the fulfilment of some long-cherished ambitions; so with loyalty to her past, she obediently leaves it. A bright little teacher, fortunate in ability and in receiving a teacher's full outfit, was sent to her first school on a pittance of a salary. For two terms she worked faithfully, and then resigned her place, giving as her reason that she could not grow on so small a salary; the parents pleaded; the children cried and clung to her, but conscience, who knew better than trustees all that growth meant to the aspiring girl, bade her go with a "God-speed." Such teachers who leave their school-rooms for a more imperative work, need no comforting. Duty generally rewards them with the joy of service - nothing more. But Duty has her counterfeits and her false signs which may deceive even the very elect teachers; they who are so deceived into leaving their work years before their time deserve the most pitying sympathy, for they are heavy losers, as are the children to whom they should be ministering; oftenest of all, such teachers have no other work or other joy ahead of them, and they feel that their real living is over. Now we know that one counterfeit of duty is a dyspeptic conscience, and that faithful teachers are quite apt to be troubled with it; but there are teachers and teachers who are not troubled that way; they stay on away beyond their time, heeding neither hints nor signs, save the one, the dollar sign, which calls, "Keep on, keep on." Shame on them to stay until some day they are sent away by a vote. A word to the woman who has convinced herself that she is too old to teach; she may be fifty, sixty, or more. She has searched diligently for her deadline, making every seeming failure one more evidence that she has found it. Let us, who would gladly give her the right to step over it, if we might, question her. You say that you are gray; well, now! what is the matter with gray? Never mind your wrinkles, for don't you know that little children, and large ones, too, hardly notice the difference between a wrinkle and a dimple when they look at an old face with love in their eyes? And really, wrinkles are ahead with children, whose dearest child-friend is the grandmother in the home. Isn't it something to be proud of to have reached the "grandma" stage in teaching? Children, large or small, don't like worry lines; but of these you haven't a one. Did you say that your age had sent you too far away from the child world? Not while memory serves you so faithfully that it keeps your childhood joys near at hand, so that at any moment you can charm children with a story beginning, "When I was a girl," or, "Once upon a time." What if your eager children interrupt your recital of some thrilling eighteenth-century event, with, "Were you grown up when that happened, teacher?" Such a question from child-lips is a complimentary one, implying that the further back you are, the more you know. What! you teaching yet? Now don't be shot by an arrow like this. Go right along as erectly as sixteen and teach yet. "Handsome is that handsome does," is as true to-day as ever, but never quite true." So says one teacher who calls herself unattractive; whose daily cross is, perhaps, some physical defect. She is painfully aware that her plainness keeps pace with her years; so she says that she ought to leave teaching, for isn't it everywhere said and written now-a-days that grace, beauty, and wholeness, only should preside in the school-room, that the children may see perfectness? But stop, teacher! suppose you went into a school of blind children. Your homeliness wouldn't matter to the children, would it? And you know very likely from your own experience, that a plain teacher, on her very first day of school, can smite her children with love blindness, and then they imagine that their teacher is "lovely." Go try it again, good plain teacher! Try it again! The teacher with an over-conscience! She has worked herself down, to bring her born-short children up; her superintendent was not experience crowned. Believing that every teacher should be a modern Hercules, he tested his own with next to impossible "labors." Our teacher with an over-conscience sighed and said like the hero of old, “I am a servant, and therefore I must obey." Having done all, what if her "results" were not "promotions"! With the gods, to fight bravely was to win nobly, so you have won, teacher; wait and be advised. A new order of things is surely on its way; give a term to resting and to taking some tonic that will reduce your conscience to its usual normal size and health, then go back to your work; you will be as glad to get back as a lonesome little child who has lost his way from home. "Minerva, dear,” I said, “go to the end of the line." The child burst out, with tears: "I can't, teacher, there is someone else there." |