Interview and photos by Elena Osmanllari and Kelly Sandoval
Dragon Echo Staff
The Art Club’s mini-mums have been popular at NHS this year, adding a fun new accessory to Homecoming fashion.
Art Club Sponsor Amanda Heron said 10 to 12 students helped make the mini-mums, adding that this is a fund-raiser for the club to help pay for trips to art museums and other activities.
“We take a spring museum trip to Houston or Dallas, and eventually we’re hoping to go to San Antonio or Austin,” she said. “Fund-raisers such as this help us pay for the vans to take students.”
Ms. Heron first had the idea of making mini-mums last year, when the parent of a student offered the use of her button maker.
“Candace Hicks, who is an SFA professor, was helping us screen print shirts,” Ms. Heron said. “She told us she had a button-maker, and we realized we could attach ribbons to buttons to make mini-mums.”
Another exciting aspect of the project is Art students seeing people around campus wearing the mums or spirit pins they made.
“We want art students to develop networking skills,” Ms. Heron said. “We want them to know how to make a sale, because professional artists have to know how to be their own agents.”
Art Club students will have another fund-raiser in the spring, and Ms. Heron said she hopes it will be as fun and creative as the mini-mums have been.
Ms. Heron said the next trip for the Art Club will be attending school days at the Texas Renaissance Festival with choir students.
“The trips are always so much fun,” she said. “Last year we went to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Students were walking up to a Greek sarcophagus and saying – ‘Is this real?’ It was history staring them in the face.”