What is more fun than using a tufting gun to embroider your favourite cartoon characters? Getting the fruits of your labour in keychain format at the end of the day! Children aged 12 and above had the thrill of using a tufting gun to create a Mickey Mouse or a duck or a mushroom at the “Embroidery” workshop happening at the 43rd Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) in Expo Centre Sharjah.
“This is rug tufting, and we use yarn to make the pattern. The yarn is threaded on the gun first using a threader or a bent wire and then in a shooting action it weaves the design you want. We will then cut the patterns, make a keychain with it and present it to the kids to take home,” explained Ann, who along with her colleague Cherry from Mofun Studio in Umm Suqueim, Dubai has been training children at the workshop.
Mofun Studio also does a lot of arts and crafts activities such as mosaic art, glass painting, tote bag DIY and marbling art at their centre in Dubai.
A tufting frame keeps the rug firm while the gun shoots the yarn on the rug. Going by the numbers of the children making a beeline for the workshop, it definitely is one of the most popular ones at SIBF 2024.
SIBF 2024, which got underway in Expo Centre Sharjah on November 6, has in store 1,357 activities for children and adults alike. This year, the 12-day event is presenting a comprehensive programme of 600 workshops for various age groups, including 465 sessions for adults and children and 135 for early childhood, covering heritage, media, entrepreneurship, technology, environment, arts, life skills, and creative writing.
Organised by the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), and themed ‘It Starts with a Book’, the book fair will come to a close on November 17 after playing host to 2,520 publishers from 112 countries.