Medicine Pouch

I am doing a Native American unit in art in preparation for an artist in resident that will be working with my classes with all my classes. This artist is also Native American, and from the Oneida Nation Tribe.

I had a parent donate an entire box of leather samples to my class, perfect for the medicine pouch. I showed the 5th graders a power point on the purpose of the medicine pouch in the Native American culture and it also contained lots of examples of medicine pouches.

The design was quite simple for the pouch, two rectangular pieces sewn together, they could include a flap if they wanted. They were required to have two types of stitches in their pouch as well, the whip stitch and the straight stitch. Lastly, they got to embellish with beads and leather scraps.