Poetry and Book Art

3rd Friday January 2013 
Poetry Cards Activity

The initial idea for this activity was to provide participants with materials for making a postcard and encourage them to write a short poem inspired by the design of their postcards. But since we want an activity suitable for all and not everyone can come up with a poem on the spot, we decided to modify the plan. We provided some poems as sources of inspiration that participants could use to design their own hand-made cards. Since the Valentine’s Day was around the corner, it was a great opportunity to motivate the visitors to participate in activity that would allow them to design and create their own Valentine's Day cards. So I found a few Valentine poems for post cards and made a hand-out sheet featuring some love poems.

As for the base, we prepared two formats for the postcards; folding cards in different colors and plain postcards with one side for a message and address.

Other materials and tools prepared for the participates included tissue papers, scissors, glue sticks, laces and color markers. In the museum we had a lot of old postcards that had a variety of images, so we used these as sources of images for the collage. Participants could cut out images on these old postcards and glue them onto their own postcards for decoration. For the decoration of the poetry card station, I made a banner that said “Make A Poetic Valentine Postcard” and also hung a string of a Valentine poems in heart shapes. Here are the before and after photos:

During the event I found out that most adult participants were very interested in the old postcards, while children were more interested to use color papers and laces for their hand-made postcards. Based on my observations, I don’t feel like the theme of poetry cards came through exactly as I had envisioned. There were a number of participants who came up with very creative ways of using the handout sheet and the poems, but in general the majority of the participants focused on the visual aspect of card making activity. We had a total of 328 visitors (not including the 70 collaborators and their guests) for this 3rd  Friday event and by the end of the evening, 100 folding cards (by my estimation) and all the 150 post card-backs that we prepared were gone. These numbers show that many of the visitors enjoyed the card making activity, so in general: thumbs up! 

You can find more photos of the event here.