Augie's workshop

Time: Saturday, January 21, 2006

Activity: Making sculptures using metal wires and other scrap metal.

People: Augie (the workshop guide), Sammie and Crystal (the ALA coaches), Wesley, Eddie, Leland, and David (the Bluedots.)

We had a blast on Saturday! There were music, artistic images to be created, an awesome workshop leader, and food. What more could we asked for. I was first surprised about how easy it was to work with metal. When we first started making our metal figurines, I didn't realize that we started. It felt like we were playing. We were cutting the gutter guards and transforing them into a head, arms, legs, and a body. Augue took us step by step into creating our own figurines. The biggest challenge with using aluminum gutter guards was that they were extremely too flexible and it can be very sharp. I kept folding the gutter guard to thin and everyone cut or scratch themsleves at least once. But this did not stop anyone from creating their metal person.

The metal wires that we used were to form the body into what looked a bit like muscles. We all used about three different size metal wires. The wires were push through the gutter guard and wrap around different parts of the body, such as the head, arms, and legs. The thicker the wire was, the harder it was to wrap the figurine. As we were working on the figures, Augie would tell us interesting and hysterical stories about the people that he had met and growing up in the Congos. Every now and then he was dance a bit too. With all the laughing, you would think that we weren't working. But by the end of our workshop we had a standing metal figure. Augie promise that the teens will get to decorate their figurines in the next workshop.