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Cindy Koedoot's seventh grade special education class at Citsyide is using the objects for their contribution to The Thread Project: One World, One Cloth. People in more than 50 countries participating in the effort to create a "world cloth," woven from threads collected from around the world.
"You'd never pick these threads to go together, but they work," Koedoot said, as she watched students take turns weaving Wednesday morning.
The world cloth will eventually contain 49 2-by 7-foot panels similar to the one being woven in Zeeland. The first two sets have already been completed and the Zeeland students are working on the third section, titled "Ariadne's Prayer." The title comes from the Greek myth of Ariadne, a goddess who presented the hero Theseus a bundle of thread to help him retrace his steps out of the Cretan labyrinth.
Other panels from this section are being woven on looms in Greece, New Jersey, Florida and Minnesota.
"It really has a beauty to it," Koedoot said about the cloth.
Koedoot said the organizer of the project's ultimate goal is to have the cloth hang somewhere in the United Nations. The project was founded by Terry Helwig, who wanted to make a way to unite the world through making the cloth.
Helwig said she came up with the idea after Sept. 11 "rocked the world," in her words.
"Shocked by the depth of such hatred, I lay awake most of that first night. I imagined thousands of others, awake in the darkness as well -- some crying, some praying, most despairing. I worried about our world, seeming (to be) hanging by a thread, and I reflected on the thread from which we hung. Was one thread enough? Again, I pictured people around the world tying their threads together... Daring to believe that our fragile threads of hope are enough, especially when joined together, I clipped the first thread, starting in motion The Thread Project: One World, One Cloth," Helwig wrote on the project's Web site.
The vertical strings in the cloth are blue, with the collected story threads running horizontally through the cloth.
In addition to the thread Koedoot's class has received from around the world, students are putting a piece of themselves into the cloth as well.
"It's neat that all the pieces have a story," Koedoot said.
Derek Koomen, a seventh-grader in Koedoot's class brought in a piece of twine used on his family farm for baling hay.
"My dad has a hay field," Koomen said.
Koedoot said she found out about the project after traveling to New Hampshire during the summer to study with a master weaver from South America. Koedoot said she told a woman sitting next to her in the class about how she uses looms in her class, and she in turn told her about The Thread Project.
Koedoot has students weave in her classroom on a regular basis. She was able to purchase nine looms for her students through a service learning grant five years ago.
Weaving, Koedoot said, teaches the students valuable life and vocational lessons, such as quality control and staying on task.
"It teaches them that there is a right way and a wrong way, and to fix it if it needs to be," Koedoot said.
"The students produce a quality product that they feel very good about," Koedoot said.
Students use the looms to make rugs, which they sell at parent-teacher conferences and local craft fairs. The class uses the money from selling the rugs to go on a field trip at the end of the year.
Last year, Koedoot said the students raised $700 by selling the rugs, which enabled them to go to Toronto for three days at the end of the school year.
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