Last SOHO Night: Letters, Dancing and the Radical Jewelry Makeover

Last Thursday was an amazing and fun end to our program nights! Now we just have one week of makeovers and the final Closing Ceremony where family, friends, and everyone connected to the SOHO program get together and celebrate a great year.

We started off with our last Girl Talk with everyone in the same room.  A reporter and photographer from Richmond Magazine came to observe and interview which got everyone pretty excited. We started off by taking our year-end survey. After, we took out our handmade books for the last time to do some brainstorming for a thoughtful thank you note to our big or little sisters. Our prompts included: what are three of your sister's best qualities, talk about a story or moment that you remember from SOHO, and what do you wish for them in the future? After brainstorming, everyone wrote this into a letter, put it in an envelope and gave them to Tesni.

Girl Talk involved a lot of writing, so the group broke out and listened to our collaborative SOHO 2013-14 mix for the first time while playing a game. The game started by everyone dancing together (or walking around if you didn't feel like dancing) and then stopping when the music stopped. When the music stopped, you would find a partner - who was usually closest to where you ended up, and tell answers a question that Tesni said out loud.  Once each group had time to share, Tesni turned on a new song and everyone started dancing again. Questions included: what is the best quality of your sister, what will you miss about SOHO, who is a woman that you look up to and why, what was your most embarrassing moment, give your partner a high five, or show your best dance move. Everyone was dancing and being silly and really getting into the game.  There was so much excitement when each new song started up. One song was particularly hilarious. One of the girls loves professional wrestling so one of the songs on the mix is her favorite wrestler's theme song. She was gone that day at SOHO, but all of the ladies got really into the song and posed like wrestlers. Our dance party turned into snack (a lot of girls danced while they ate) where the reporter was able to sit with a few girls and talk to them and their big sisters about SOHO.

After snack, we went to down to the gallery to have a tour from our Gallery Director, Caroline. She gave us a tour in the fall, too - remember screen-printing? The girls remembered her and that she had her a baby since the last time they saw her! She showed us pictures and the girls loved it. The gallery exhibition was called "Tied" and was by local Richmond artist Susie Ganch. The exhibition included the artists sculptural pieces and showcased a project called the "Radical Jewelry Makeover".

Susie is part of the Ethical Metalsmiths Collective who try to shed light on the ethical use of metals by jewelers as well as highlight our "waste culture" of disposable jewelry and clothing. The Radical Jewelry Makeover takes donations of broken or unwanted jewelry and then has local and national artists recreate these into beautiful pieces of functioning jewelry again. The end products are amazing and all of them are for sale. Most of the money goes back into the project and to the Ethical Metalsmiths.  This was an interesting thing for the girls and women to see and learn about because we are definitely effected by todays cheap throw away fashions. It made the girls think about where things come from and where they will go once we are done with them.

After our inspiring gallery tour, we went into our fiber studio. Under the direction of local artist and the Radical Jewelry Makeover's project manager Maggie Smith, we created our own pieces of art jewelry from donated materials. Everyone loved looking through all of the bins of old jewelry and picking out objects that inspired them.

Once they had chosen their pieces to work with, Maggie showed us how to create a base shape out of felt, put in eyelets to hang it from, and sew on the objects we picked out.  There was no right or wrong answer with this project. It was all about trying to create something beautiful and discover ways to make it work for you.

Maggie also talked about cohesive designing, and creating a theme or other unifying factor to make everything look good next to each other  The girls loved it!

Our last closing circle was wonderful and all of the big sisters waved the little sisters goodbye!

 

Our first round of makeovers happened last weekend, and 5 more are happening this weekend!  We'll have an amazing round of updates next week before our Closing Ceremony!