Madeline-3/11/09-Materials for the Arts

On March 11th, Sadie, Surayya, Lucy and I had our third visit at Materials for the arts. We left at 2:45 and arrived at 3:30. We signed in and put down all our things and then walked out of the office to meet Johnese. She started to tell us what we would be doing. Tuesday and Thursday are shopping days for Materials for the arts. On shopping days artists, public school teachers and other organizations come and take the recycled supplies that Materials for the Arts collects. One of the materials they can take is fabric. When the shoppers arrive at Materials for the arts they want everything they are looking for to be easy to find. Our job was to take all of the fabric off the shelf and re-fold it. All of the fabric that is donated is many different sizes, colors , and patterns so it would be very hard to re-fold and re-organize the fabric every time there is a shopping day. So instead they don’t categorize the fabric by color but just make sure they are folded neatly so it is easy for the shoppers to see all the fabrics they might be interested in taking. We folded all the fabric onto the shelves, sometimes having to use the ladder to reach the high shelves. There was a very large variety of sizes. Some were the size of patches and others were 15 feet long. We also found many clothing articles that people have donated to be used as cloth. Whenever we found an article of clothing we put it on a hanger and hung it in the entrance of Materials for the Arts so anyone working there could take it. Johnese also helped us think of projects we could with these pieces of fabric or any other materials we had seen. At 5:00 it was time to go.