I volunteer for an afternoon program at my local nursing home - one of the many Mather Lifeways - and I'm always dreaming up new stuff to "do". Today I wanted to experiment with making art quilts, so I used SteamASeam on a bunch of different fabric scraps and came up with a sort of "kit". Background with stems already in place, and a sheet of transparency film with a bunch of cut out flower shapes. I used a plain white background, but fused it onto a colored back sheet because I read that dementia causes loss of depth of field vision in many. I put a black border on the transparency too but that was mostly for me - hard to keep track of those babies!
Now these are all ladies with fairly severe dementia, so the test was if what I gave them was enough information or not. Only one of the five ladies I had playing with me today grasped it right away and began to place the flowers on her own. One slept through the whole exercise and the other three needed me to peel the flowers off the transparency and hand them over. But all were able to get the concept of putting the flowers down on the fabric, although I got a lot of "where does this go?" questions. Anyway we ended up with 4 pretty cute pieces of fabric art, which I will now quilt and finish.
Now the goal is to donate these to the
AAQI but I have to find out if there are any legal ramifications - these women aren't exactly capable of signing a consent form. But even if I can't donate them, it was a lot of fun and everybody was very impressed with the ladies' work and there were a lot of smiles!
ALZHEIMER'S ART QUILT INITIATIVE
