Cruinniu na nOg is an annual event run by Creative Ireland, and Ireland is the only country in the world to have a national day of free creativity for children and young people under 18. The day is usually the 2nd Saturday in June but has been slowly expanding to take over the first two weeks of June. We have been running Cruinniu workshops for 5 years now and for 2024 we were invited to work with our local primary school Drumlease NS in Dromahair on an art project for their 9-10 year olds. The theme we took was ‘Mad Mobiles and Fancy Flags’. The idea was to be able to decorate the classroom with hanging mobile displays and make a large flag that represented every child in the class.
To make the mobiles we used squares of clear acrylic and used a process called Hydro Dipping, which is floating special paints on water and then dipping the acrylic squares into the water to create almost stained glass like panels.
We hung the panels on the classroom washing line to dry and whilst they were drying the children then got busy with design software on the school iPads and drew shapes of animals, letters, emojis and cartoon characters. These shapes were then transferred to the lasercutter and the shapes were cut from the painted panels. We had pre-made some mobile hangers to attach the shapes and the children threaded glittery elastic to their own shapes and hung them in groups of 4 and 5 to make some mad mobiles!
In the afternoon we asked each child to imagine they were the ruler of their own country and to design a flag for that country that represented the best things about it and about them. We had estimated that this task would take 15-20 minutes but the children really got excited about creating the perfect flag and colouring them in beautifully.
Once all the designs were made we collected them and laid them out to see what our final flag would look like.
The final stage was to photocopy each design onto special dye sublimation paper using our modified Epson inkjet printer loaded with dye sublimation inks. Dye sublimation is a process to heat press full colour printed designs onto polyester fabric. We used our handheld heat press to transfer each design onto the large white flag and each child got to press their own picture to make the final flag. The result was even better than we had imagined and the children and teachers were really happy with all the artistic work over the two days.
