February 25th, 2021

The Pajama Project

You might have already heard about our new all-school collaborative project, the Pajama Project! We  will all work together with Cape's mom, LouLou, on creating St. John's pajamas. 
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This week we started to explore our PajamaProject documentation board and the children recognized Cape's pajamas instantly.
We learned that Cape's mom is an artist and that she turns her watercolor art into pajamas. The children showed a great interest in it and had many questions about the process.

How do you know that?
​- Bea (after we shared with them that LouLou is an artist that paints watercolors)

​I don't really understand because I'm a kid.
- Hugh

Hugh and Jade inspecting fabric samples from LouLou in the hallway.

To be able to gather more information, ask our questions and get a better understanding of the process we invited LouLou to the Brown Room (via Zoom). Today she showed us her work space, the watercolor pallets she uses to create her paintings and how a painting ends up on a pajama.
After she completes a water color painting she uses a machine called a scanner to transfer in onto her computer. Once her painting is on the computer she can move individual parts of the painting around, adjust, resize and duplicate them. Then her finished design can get turned into pajamas.

We had a few follow-up questions for LouLou:


How are we gonna do that? Get the paintings on the computer? - Daniel

LouLou said that she will assist us with that process and will be able to scan our paintings for us.

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How did the drawings get on the fabric? - Sam

We learned about processes called screen printing and reel printing:

Like using a printer. I have a printer. It prints drawings. - Hugh

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​LouLou, how does the fabric turn into pajamas? - Wilder

After the design got printed on the fabric, we learned that patterns are being used to cut the fabric. Those pieces of fabric are then being sewn together in a specific way in order to turn them into pajamas we can wear. Sewing was a great keyword, since we will start our introduction to sewing in the Brown Room next week!

The process of creating pajamas from start to finish requires quite a few steps but we are excited to dive deeper into these individual processes and learn more about them as the project continues. 

Thank you LouLou for sharing your work with us!

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continuing our work on designing a dragon costume...
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Hugh worked on a large scale painting for a dragon costume idea. He started by painting the costume itself (a curvy body, sticks for people to hold the costume up underneath the body, a tail on the left side and a head on the right side) but then asked himself the question
"But how are we gonna hold it? When we cut it out it's gonna drip?" 
​(wondering if his painted design will work as the actual costume)

​Differentiating a design from the actual costume is a fairly new and complicated concept in the Brown Room. We are understanding that our drawing doesn't have to be or work as our actual costume. We can use other materials to create the costume and we can use our design as an inspiration or guide to create it. We discussed that making a design is similar to making a plan or creating a collection of ideas and thoughts. What do we want it to look like? What materials and tools do we need to create it? ​

Hugh then painted the materials and tools he thought we would need for his particular design underneath his painting of the dragon costume. For that, he identified details in his costume and used critical thinking to come up with materials that would fit his/his design's/his costume's needs. Here he drew on past classroom experiences with different materials such as scissors, glue, paint, paper, tape, and sticks.

"Yeah we have to find sticks outside. I was thinking of that. Maybe outside on the playground. Or at home." - Hugh

Here you can see Hugh's finished incredible design for a dragon costume: