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January 31, 2006Rare PostcardsStudents participate in Jordan River Arts Council fiber projectBOYNE CITY - Sure, a postcard is something the dentist sends when it's time for a check-up.But it can also be a miniature work of art in fiber. That's what middle school students in six Antrim and Charlevoix County schools discovered recently when they participated in fiber postcard workshops sponsored by the Jordan River Arts Council. Under the direction of Kathie Briggs, a Charlevoix fabric artist and instructor, the students designed decorative fiber postcards and mailed them - at the letter rate - to the East Jordan Arts Center. The hand-cancelled postcards will be displayed in the center's lower gallery as part of its "Rare Threads with a Twist" exhibition March 5-April 7. "The kids really took to it," said Briggs, whose art quilts and dolls have been shown nationally and internationally. "I showed them some samples, gave them a quick demo and set them loose, and it was amazing." Something of a phenomenon in the fiber art world, fiber postcards are just that - rectangles of postcard-size fabric fused to an actual postcard or put together like a miniature quilt with an address side that looks like the back of a postcard. Embellished with glitter painting, beading, decorative machine stitching, hand embroidery and even feathers, they're legal to send through the mail if they're no larger than 4-by-6 inches and no thicker than 1/8 of an inch, Briggs said. "I mail mine through Eastport and the postmaster loves to see them," she added. The postcards are so popular that there are on-line fabric postcard swap groups like Art2Mail and Postmarked Art. "Most of us enjoy making them because it's a challenge to work in a very small format," said Briggs, who belongs to one such group. "It's something you can do relatively quickly. You don't have to invest as much time as in an art quilt or art doll. And it's tremendous fun to get them in the mail and see what someone else has done in that format." Students in Boyne City Middle School's first- and second-hour art classes created a design from fabric pieces they cut out and attached to background fabric using fusible bond and a hot iron. Then they fused the completed design onto a pre-addressed postcard and added a hand-written artist statement. Their works - ranging from abstract to representational - ran the gamut from beach, underwater and outer space scenes to themes on hearts, initials and football, said teacher Marla Watson. "They're beautiful. They really turned out very nice," Watson said. "It's interesting to see the different students because some of them really dove into the project and got really creative and cut out tiny pieces and overlapped them." Seventh-grader Kaci Trixler said her fantastic underwater scene complete with pink dolphins and polka-dot fish was inspired by a trip to Florida. "We were going to go scuba diving last year but the waves were too high so we went to an aquarium (instead)," she said. Trixler, 13, said the workshop taught her to use several new tools and materials. "It's different. In art we don't usually use irons or any type of fabric," she said. "We just usually use paint, pencil and paper." The project was designed to pique student interest in fiber art, said Babs Young, a board member of the Jordan River Arts Council. It's part of a greater council mission that includes K-12 education. "Many of our exhibits have this component," Young said. "Sometimes it is simply a docent-led tour of the exhibit, sometimes schools come to JRAC for a class related to the theme of the exhibit and sometimes we go into the schools with a project or a class related to the exhibit." Watson said the workshops help create excitement among students and let them know that people outside of school engage in art. "It gets them thinking outside of the school classroom and into the real world," she said.
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