Learning life skills through play
Meet Maya
Owner and Createor of GreenARTS
Maya Grafmuller is an artist and designer who enjoys finding ways to repurpose materials in a creative and thoughtful manner. She has studied at Pasadena Art Center and Otis Parsons, and has twenty+ years of experience in film and television art departments. She also freelances as an interior and exterior designer.
Maya has been a culinary coach with Kitchen Kid’s camp in Santa Monica and with the Jamie Oliver Food Revolution, teaching children how to cook healthy meals.
Currently, she teaches her afterschool enrichment classes Trash 2 Treasure and Sew What?! at Farragut Elementary, El Marino Elementary, El Rincon and Linwood Howe Elementary in the Culver City School District. And Short Ave. Elementary in LAUSD. She truly enjoys sharing with children some skills and knowledge they will be able to use for life.
Sew What?!
Sewing for beginners and beyond. We use colorful felt fabric and embroidery threads, showing children how to sew a project from scratch, coming up with an idea, drawing a pattern, choosing materials, cutting and sewing fun little projects like cute plushies and custom zipper bags.
Daily Camp Flow
9:00am to 9:30am Campers arrive. We have our morning talk, discuss the plan for the day, go over camp rules.
9:30am to 11:30am Trash2Treasure, 3D recycled materials project time.
11:30am to 12noon Clean up and prepare for lunch.
12noon to 1:00pm Walk to park (30 feet away) have a picnic lunch and playground time. Campers should brining a packed lunch.
1:00pm to 2:30 pm Sew What?! Sewing for beginners and beyond.
2:30pm to 3:00pm We provide a health snack just before pick up.
GreenARTS
GreenARTS is an educational company. Through GreenARTS camp and after school classes it teaches children the lost art of hand sewing and how to create sculptures and toys from recycled materials. These activities improve hand eye coordination, dexterity, and the children’s overall skill of critical thinking.
GreenARTS started serving the Culver City community in 2014 with just one after school class one day a week and in 2015 started running spring and summer camps. Currently we are servicing multiple Culver City schools five days a week.
Trash 2 Treasure
We focus on fun ways to repurpose recycled goods into art and practical objects. We’ll discuss the importance of recycling and also how to discover the beauty in used things by giving them a second life. I’ll teach the children how to string, glue, staple, tape, paper mâché, decorate and paint recycled materials to create something new and special. Together we will make things like keepsake boxes, robots, jetpacks, puppets and picture frames, and these are just a few ideas I bring to the table. I will encourage the students to come up with their own ideas and by the end of the course they will create their own designs.
GreenARTS Team Members
Tess Danielson is a vocal coach and continuous student of all things. She just received her BA in theatre Arts from Utah Valley University. Her emphasis was in performance and design. And she loved every minute of it. Through the labs at UVU she was able to learn many versatile things about design and outside the box thinking.
Tess from the young age of 7 was obsessed with the show project runway. And even made her little sister model for her, as she made a dress out of newspaper. Because of this she is very excited to work on the trash 2 treasure projects!
Miss Rachel is a fan of GreenArts Camp and Trash to Treasure. A self-proclaimed finder, Rachel keeps fabric, cardboard, and extra baubles of all kinds to create costumes for her Mixon Musical Theatre productions. She has been sewing since age 10, and kitting and cross-stitching since before then. Her favorite thing to make is really pancakes cuz you can eat them, but dresses are a close second. Rachel has been teaching children in theatre, singing, & piano for over 20 years, plus sewing kid costumes since 2004. "I can't wait to help all these student art projects come to Life. Let's play!"