Saturday Crafternoons, the latest offering from the Wylie House Museum, is a family-friendly weekend activity packed with educational fun. Crafternoons are offered for free each Saturday year-round, when visitors of all ages can drop in from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The program offers a tangible way for participants of all ages to understand the lives and experiences of people in the past while also inspiring creativity and collaboration.
The Wylie House Museum is the former home of Andrew Wylie, the first president of Indiana University. Wylie, his wife, Margaret, and 10 of their 12 children lived in the home, which they built in 1835 after moving from Pennsylvania several years earlier. During Wylie’s 21-year tenure as president, IU grew from its nascent state as Indiana College and expanded student registration and course offerings to become Indiana University in 1838. The home remained in the Wylie family until it was sold in 1915.
Now owned and operated by IU Libraries, the Wylie House Museum is open to the public for free guided tours, activities and events. It serves as an academic resource for IU students, faculty and staff and the Bloomington community.
Each month, Saturday Crafternoons offers a different craft activity. Crafts have included writing with a quill pen and ink made of berries, embroidering, making native plant cyanotypes, pressing flowers and creating old-fashioned thaumatrope toys. The museum provides the supplies to make a small keepsake, along with information about how it relates to the Wylie House and why it is important today.
Museum visitors who attend Saturday Crafternoons during July will learn about how fabrics were hand-woven on large looms with thread. They’ll learn a simplified version of the weaving process and create a decorative Wylie House keepsake, using yarn and felt on a cardboard frame.
Melania Majowicz, museum generalist and outdoor interpreter, said many of the activities connect families, students and community members with the Wylie House Museum. The crafts are often chosen based on what the museum has available in its collection, reflecting 19th- and early 20th-century Bloomington and the Wylie family themselves.
“Our quill pen activity relates to the large collection of letters we have from the Wylie family,” Majowicz said. “The copper tape art activity relates to Theophilus Wylie and his scientific ‘tinkering.’ He had the first telephone in Indiana, built a daguerreotype and left us with a few photographs.”
Parents and children often work on the crafts together. This type of arts-based learning helps young participants gain a deeper connection to the topic they’re learning about by activating the whole child through a hands-on sensory-based experience, according to Kelly Jordan, pre-K-12 experiences manager at the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art.
“As a child’s fingers fumble across a loom and feel the tension of the yarn as they pull it through, they are learning about the concept of weaving, acquiring the early skills of weaving and developing embodied cognition,” Jordan said. “And when they get tangled in a knot, they might gain a greater appreciation of the heart, time and work that goes into some of the creative processes that are foundational to each culture.”
The museum employs IU students to facilitate the weekend program.
“Providing a program that gets people using their hands and being creative while also learning a bit of how the people before us lived and functioned connects people with the past,” said Livi Holdread, a senior studying history in the College of Arts and Sciences and community arts education in the School of Education.
Holdread said she enjoys showing visitors letters and correspondence written by the Wylie family because it helps create a connection to the past.
“They get a sense of realness of the Wylie family members,” she said. “They were real people with real lives, just like us.”
In August, visitors can enjoy a science-based activity with copper tape, LEDs and batteries as they create firefly art in honor of the Indiana state insect.