Austerity tablecloths

This summer, I worked with one of my favourite collaborators Gilly Vose (from the Norris Museum) on a 'memories in the community' print project. Together with some museum volunteers, we met with the lovely people who attend the St Ives day Centre to talk about their memories of foods and cooking from the 1940's. 

We developed images from these memories and the older people took part in screen printing these onto tablecloths.  As you can probably see, one memory lead to another and we included some of the memories that weren't specifically about food:

 

 

Two of the women in the group had been bus conductresses when they were young, and Maud remembered paying thrupence for a bath at the bathhouse in Islington.  That caused great hilarity - printing Maud in the bath!

 

One of the men remembered his mother knitting on the bus and most of the women remember knitting all the time.  Some of them still do.

Ration books, cod liver oil, these were common memories. Country and city memories were very different and people in the group had grown up in very different places. One gentleman remembered milking the family cow when he was about 8 years old and eating rabbit pie.  Another man grew up in Italy and remembered aubergine being his favourite food that his mother cooked at home.

"Porridge all the time", "Corned beef sandwiches for tea", "We worked as a family and scraped things together"  - these were some of the quotes we included on the cloths.

The whole project concluded with a traditional tea party and sing along in the museum garden. And the cloths have gone back to the day centre where can hopefully bring back some happy memories whilst being used.

Lode Star Festival 2015

This year Cary and I ran a workshop at the Lode Star Festival to create Moon and Star lanterns. It was fun even though the wind made it a challenging day. Luckily the wind completely disappeared, just in time for the Lantern Parade across the site.  Accompanied by the Arco Iris Samba band   from Cambridge it was a magical event.  

And we met so many lovely  people who came to make lanterns!

 

And Phoebe Monk   who organised the parade as well as various other things at the festival had this idea to hang the lanterns up around the site so that the audience would see them as they left the main arena at the end of the evening.  Wish I'd had the energy to stay that late myself!

Kite Making was Epic!

 

As you can see by this comments feedback board we had a very good Family Learning Day - making kites and printing T-shirts on Saturday at Cottenham Village College!  and some delicious aromas from the cake baking group!

Bunting - screen print

And another School Print Day, but this time it's bunting. 

Working with year 6 children from All Saints Inter Church Acadamy in March  (the town not the month) and organised by the wonderful youth arts organisation 20Twenty Productions.  

What a nice way to end the school term and a very nice gift to leave for the school as the young people move up to secondary school.

School Banners

 I've been so busy having fun with summer workshops this year that I haven't had a chance to blog about it all.  We've been making art all over East Anglia! So, I'm going to try to do some catching up, and what better place to start than with the banners done with Rackham School in Witchford.

Each banner was printed by a class and was based on a concept from the school ethos.  It was potentially quite challenging because the themes were not directly visual:  'courage, wisdom, peace and love'.  The children were unphased and came up with all sorts of very clever ways to depict these themes as you can see below.

I usually hang the banners up on a sunny day to spray them with fire retardant - and that seemed like a good opportunity to take some photographs.

T-shirt print - Norris Museum

We had a brilliant T-shirt printing day yesterday at the Norris Museum.

We printed about 110 T-shirts with children- each one different.  The weather was perfect and as you can see we worked outside in the lovely gardens.  The children drew things in the museum or in the garden and Cary and I helped them to print these onto there T-shirts.  Thanks to Gilly and the team of museum volunteers for making this such a successful day.

It looks like I was doing all the printing in this picture- but the children all participated in the printing process - even the very tiny ones.

And there's always that moment of magic when they see their designs transformed into colour!

Screen Printing Fabrics

I like doing this - printing the same basic design elements in different layouts.  And it's summer..... so it has to be sunflowers!

Cottenham summer school 2015

I think it's been 17 years since I first started teaching Screen printing at Cottenham Summer School and each year my students amaze me both with their creativity and their productivity!

So, here is some of the wonderful work by adult learners on the Sensational Screen Print course this year, 2015, at Cottenham Summer School.

Frustratingly I realise that I took far fewer photos this year so there's lots of textiles that I  don't have pictures of...........but here is some of what I do have:

Thorney Wall Hangings

Another community project with Thorney Museum.  Volunteers from the lunch club have been stitching these marvelous banners which went on display for the first time a few weeks ago.  There are more to come as annd when they get finished.