The Collage

For the entirety of my teenage years, I was an adept collager.  I even went so far as to collage my entire bedroom door.  My mom eventually modge-podged the whole door.  I expressed my self through this art form, and continue to love it.  Today Tessie made her first collage, and my heart skipped a little, thinking that I may have passed this on to her.

It started when I picked her up from ballet today.  There was a box out front of the studio full of free ballet magazines.  Tessie loves catalogs and magazines, so I snagged one for her.  She gushed over the photos of the beautiful ballerinas, all the way home.  Once back home, she got out her scissors and started to cut out some of the ballerinas.  I asked her if she would like to try making a new kind of art project, and her face lit up with excitment.  I explained that a collage was a piece of art you made by cutting out pictures of things that interested you, and then glueing those pictures onto a piece of paper.  I said we could hang up her collage in her room when she finished it.

Tessie dove in with gusto.  She soon had a great collection of dancers in various poses, as well as the words "dance" and "ballet."  All on her own, she cut out the images she had chosen, arranged them on the piece of card stock I had given her, and glued them all on with a glue stick.  She was so engrossed in her project, it was a delight to watch.  She was very selective and certain when she reached completion.   I loved it.  Tes found the perfect spot in her room to hang it, and she taped it to the wall.  It was all incredibly reminiscent of my childhood, and nothing less than absolutely beautiful.