Cottenham Summer School 2012

Several people each printed an image onto Ann's tea towel

and the same for Nicola

Every year I teach a week long course for adults at Cottenham Summer School Cott Summer School.

 It's a wonderful opportunity to really explore screen printing in depth and to make some complex layered pieces. The college generously gives us 2 big rooms to work in which means that the participants can print some really big pieces of cloth.  I am just processing the photos from August this year and as a taster here are the tea towels which everyone made as a fun excercise. During the week, each person in the workshop printed one or two of their images on a  teatowel for someone else in the group to take home with them as a gift.  More pictures to follow as I organise them.

Butterflies in the Bandstand

Around the bandstand

Cary did this lovely project with a group of girls from ADEC (adec info) and lots of families who dropped in to make butterflies and flowers for the park.  They were displayed in Jubilee gardens in Ely last weekend at the Bandstand marathon and very pretty the park looked too! 

Sunflower prints

Whole cloth

Detail

And a separate cloth, with border

I actually have 3 great, big sunflowers in my garden this year.  I try growing them every summer but usually something gets them before they flower - so in celebration I have done couple of lengths of sunflower prints.

Jubilation

Another project I worked on this summer -Jubilation!  This was a project organised by Gilly Vose of the Norris Museum in St Ives (Norris) and funded by the St Ives Town Council ( hooray for them, in a time when arts funding is being cut by councils all over) see their facebook page St Ives facebook

Gilly led the reminiscence sessions for this project.  Young people from St Ivo School and museum volunteers spoke to people who attend the day centres in St Ives about their memories of the coronation and other public celebrations from the period.  The focus was a festive tea table and the delicious, strawberry jelly which Gilly made!

Then - the screen print sessions. The young people worked with the older people to translate their memories and stories into images which we screen printed on the banners. They were hung in the corn exchange for the jubilee weekend celebrations and again for the heritage week.  So here they are in red white and blue - of course!

Carnival Crossroads Eastbound

Main banner at the front of the parade

Front of the Luton section

Add caption

Front of Ipswich Section

The carnival itself, in Luton! on 8 July 2012

Some links to the other artists involved in designing costumes for the parade: 

 Carnival Crossroads Eastbound Artists

It's been both very exciting and a great priveledge to work with so many wonderful designers on this project.

Carnival crossroads Eastbound

On the print table

Attaching the banners to the poles

The Cambridge banners - at rehearsel

Cambridge rehearsel

One of the Ipswich banners being tested in my garden - the illustration comes directly from Julie Carpenter's lovely sketch for her giant puppet

And on the day - banners assembled and stacked against the wall waiting to be allocated to the carriers.

Here are some pictures taken in the run up to the Big Day

Carnival Crossroads Eastbound

Cary's brilliant illustrations and cutouts for the Luton banners

and his football cutout

You can see both these designs realised in the banners above.

Cary's illustration for banner which depicted the twin themes of Luton as the carnival city and a city of diverse people

So, this is the banner- it went out in a tour round town, the evening before the event to publicise the carnival

It was a huge job and I couldn't have done without my team - Aiden, who did endless cutting out and some printing,  and Cary who did lots of brilliant illustrations for the banners and was my fellow printer when the banners got too big to do on my own.  Not to mention Dan who came to stay in the middle of  the final push to complete the banners. Despite suffering great domestic discomfort, he played the accompagniment to the hum of my sewing machine on his trombone.  Why don't we have a picture of that?

Carnival Crossroads Eastbound

I've been so busy this summer that I haven't had a chance to blog ...............so finally I am starting to look through my photos and try to place them in some kind of order.  I'll be posting some of these over the next few weeks as I sort through them.

One of the big projects I've been working on is Carnival Crossroads - Eastbound.  The carnival which took place in Luton in July this year and our section had 500 people- 100 from each of the eastern cities of Cambridge, Luton, Southend, Norwich and Ipswich.  Each city had it's own designers and themes which were inspired by the city itself.  My job was to create a title banner and a series of banners which served as chapter headings for each section, which described the city, it's various themes and which united the whole parade with a single identity- Eastbound. 

This banner was made at the Mas Camp in Norwich with the help of Jankie and a lovely art student whose name I don't remember