Craft Club Project 2- Steampunk Robot Softies

I am a big fan of Steampunk art. It really captures my imagination and I admire the vast creativity. I knew my Craft Club Crayons would think it was neat too.Their steampunk images are coming along nicely. So far they have several robots and a steampunk Sponge Bob.  I can hardly wait to share the finished results. In the meantime, here is a tutorial.

I collected a variety of steampunk images to view. I found these all on Google images.

Here are our inspirational images:
Steampunk Robots
Steampunk Charlie Brown
Steampunk Willy
Steampunk Crow
Steampunk Dog
Robots
Cup of Robots
Pair of Robots

From there, we discussed some of the common ideas in Steampunk like stitching, rivets, metal, gears, pins etc. Because I want craft club to be free of anxiety and drawing gears would make me anxious, I googled "gears", "clockworks" and other steampunk stuff. I cut in pasted those images into a word document and made a page of all sorts of images that the kids could cut out and use in their drawings.

I modeld drawing a robot and added some gears and steampunky stuff to my image. Then when I was done I traced over some of the lighter parts with a black felt tip marker.

The red arrows point to all the images I pasted on to my robot.
Next step, photo copy.


Then Citra-Solve transfer on to muslin. (You can read my post on that process here.) I was thrilled that the lighter details came out so clear! As always, you can click on any of these pictures to get a better view over at Flickr.

To make our robots into little softies, I simply laid another piece of muslin over the top of the image and sewed around the image. The fabric was thin enough that I could see through easily.

Next, I cut 'er out and stuffed her up. Simple stitches finished her off.



I think the Crayons will be able to do every step except for photocopy (not allowed in the teachers room) and the sewing machine part. They will be able to do the transfer and the hand sewing.