Re: Need suggestions for school patchwork

Melanie Rimmer wrote:
My 8-y-o daughter's schoolteacher approached me to ask for my help with some sewing (I have already been asked to design Joseph's Dreamcoat for the school production in June - if you want a quiet life, don't let anyone know you sew!) She and another teacher had seen a patchwork banner in another school and wanted to emulate it. All of the children have painted designs on a square of white fabric (they look about a foot square). She wants me to hem them all, then assemble them into a banner, but here's the tricky bit - she wants to be able to disassemble it at the end of the year so each child can take his or her own square home. She also wants a pocket so it can be hung from a pole. She's not a sewer, and she was worried about how difficult it would be to add a pocket (not difficult at all of course) but she wasn't at all concerned about how to loosely sew hemmed patches together in such a way that they could be easily disassembled, and still hang nicely as a banner.

All I can come up with is to hand-sew them onto a *** with fairly big running stitches. She doesn't want buttons, pop studs, velcro or anything like that, because she doesn't want any visual element interfering with the children's designs. I'm also wondering about convincing her to allow some sashing, to make each panel stand out better.

How about the self adhesive velcro - that way there would be no stitching to show through onto the front of the design. IMNSHO even sewn on velcro would be nigh on invisible of you used a white thread and sewed it onto each hemmed square *before* the children did their bit. I would recommend hemming the squares first, because that way there is no chance of losing any part of the design in the hemming process, or any bits falling off! If you can convince her to use velcro the squares could be mounted onto a backing material of a contrasting colour eliminating the need to sew sashing to anything.

Lizzy
.