Collage has a tremendous amount to recommend it as a way of making pictures and patterns. It is an excellent way of finding out about composition, which is the business of juggling with shapes and colours and textures. It makes children aware and appreciative of textures and combinations of textures in a way which is surely a good foundation for choosing and relating fabrics for furnishing and clothing in adult life. It is also an essentially cheap way of working, since much of the material can be provided by the children, and even the background can quite reasonably be old wrapping-paper or even newspaper.

We tend to think of picture and pattern making as a purely visual art. The sense of touch is also important, and collage work offers more opportunity than many other aspects of the work to train children to enjoy the feel of things. Something of this sort ought to come very early into Infant work. There is, for example, the vocabulary of the feel of things—this feels shiny, this rough, this like velvet, this smooth. Infant classes should have numbers of pieces of material of all kinds which can be fingered and handled and discussed. The appreciation of the appearance of many materials is closely connected with what they feel like—we enjoy them more because we can imagine what they feel like to touch. Whatever work we do with materials, we should, all along the line, include discussion about the feel of them and about which ones look well together.

It is of first importance to supply a wide range of materials for this work, and to display them so that they are, in themselves, a stimulus. The range should include coloured, textured and shiny paper of all kinds, wrappings from biscuits, corrugated paper from chocolates, silver and metallic papers from cakes and sweets and soaps. Coloured cellophane and tissue paper are useful. So is sandpaper. Scraps of materials of all kinds are needed, especially vivid ones. These can be supplemented by such oddments as wood shavings, lace, feathers, fur, sequins, ribbon, Christmas string and tape.

We have already noted the opportunities which this work gives for selecting and relating materials. It is important that each individual child has a really good choice of materials. Children also need to be made aware of the opportunities for juggling with shapes that collage work brings. You can change your mind half a dozen times if you don't stick each piece as you cut it out. This, I have found, needs to be pointed out very firmly and often enforced, if children are going to gain from this aspect of the work. The best way to start either pattern or picture is to decide what the main shapes are to be, cut them out and arrange them. You may then find that a painted background, for example, would be a help. This should be done before anything is stuck—otherwise you may have to paint round all sorts of complicated things. When the background is settled and the composition planned, then stick the main shapes down and start adding the details. This business of delaying the sticking means that the lesson sometimes ends with important shapes not stuck. I have found it useful to provide a supply of used envelopes so that the pieces do not get lost.

It is often a good idea to start this kind of work with an abstract picture. Then children can concentrate on choosing materials which combine interestingly and shapes which make a good composition without worrying about realistic representation. Encourage them to overlap shapes occasionally, and suggest in the early stages that other media may be used in conjunction with the materials provided, although very lovely pictures may be made with collage alone. A portrait of an imaginary bird or animal, or the face of a witch doctor or something similar, make good beginnings for pictures. It is often possible, when work has not included elaborate backgrounds, to cut away the paper background round such figures, and to make a frieze or class picture using them all. More realistic pictures offer scope for imaginative use of material, and help children to become more aware of surface textures in the world around them.

Interesting pictures can also be made in mosaic using collage. Coloured paper, perhaps obtained from the coloured pages of magazines or from old paintings, can be cut into squares and used to form a picture. An interesting exercise in the use of tone values is carried out when the picture is made up entirely from pieces cut from different intensities of newspaper type. The pieces can be overlapped to build up the shapes of the picture or design, or a small space can be left between them. It is usually best if the main lines of the picture are arranged first.

This kind of work leads naturally to the making of applique pictures in needlework, which, to my mind, often has far too little connexion with work done in the art lesson. The general lack of creativeness in the needlework of many women today is a serious reflection of the uncreative attitude towards needlework in the schools of yesterday. It is, in particular, a sad fact that at least 90 per cent of the women who attempt embroidery today go out and buy transfers, usually of a very inferior design. Embroidery, which ought to be a living and vital craft, is degenerating into a mere pastime. If we can only teach our children to carry out their own ideas, and not other people's, and this from the very beginning of needlework, then our needlework teaching will be of real value.

Applique work, like collage, should be carried out directly in the materials concerned, with little or no drawing and pattern cutting. It is not really possible for children to visualize the finished article until experience has been gained, although previous work in collage is a help. It is therefore not desirable to design in one medium, e.g. drawing, for work in another. It is better to build the picture in materials as we go along, arranging the pieces on a background.