Using templates to trace the Ladies at Bullion Hall created some beautiful flower sun catchers by painting designs onto Acrylic disks using the same techniques as you would for glass painting.
Spring Flowers Glass painting
Residency : STEAM Create to Empower
Newcastle College April 2024-July 2024
My first residency since going freelance was all been a bit of a rush but I enjoyed it very much, from interview to first session was only a week but the students in the childcare department at Newcastle College seem to have been enjoying having a chance to experiment with new crafts. I mainly ran one off sessions giving lots of groups a chance to try some new crafts, do some team building , and learn a little bit more about creativity and tinkering.
This aim of this residency was to encourage creativity from the students and introduce the lecturers to a new way of doing activities, looking at Tinkering and how the focus on the journey is more important than focusing on the outcome.
Working with GLOW and the college I developed a series of activities that would each have a different creative focus, looking at mechanisms for simple moving toys, function over aesthetics, creating simple 3D forms, and mindful activities. Alongside running some team building sessions, with the established groups and as part of an open day for new students, to encourage them to work together and experiment.
Brancepeth Castle Summer Fete
I have spent three days at the wonderful Brancepeth Castle, where I was selling my art and running mandala workshops.
Animal masks
Whenever I go to deliver a workshop, my favourite part is always what people do with the templates and materials that I bring in that I would have never thought of, and in this workshop some of the adaptations were fabulous! Although I am disappointed not to have got a picture of the shark that some parents had to help their child make!
Needle felting Robins
A chance to introduce people to new skills is always a fun workshop, at Christmas I delivered some needle felting workshops to create robins. Participants had a chance of various colours for the body and wings, along with for the famous red breast of the robin. Using wire of different colours they got legs and a beak, and in some cases a crown!
Pebble painting
The Sewing Bells group at Cornerstones contacted me asking for me to deliver some workshops, the first one was easy: Mandala cards, using my templates to create flowers, but the second one just had a brief of pebble painting! I decided to stick with what I know and I had recently done a dotting workshop with ColourBuzz and decided that this would be a good direction to go, so armed with much acrylic paint, many different tools, a hairdryer to help people dry layer, and many pebbles off I went. As ever people took the tools and materials to create their own interesting and beautiful designs.
Mini Beast Masks
Over the May bank holiday weekend, I spent many happy hours delivering workshops at the Centre for Life for visitors to create their own Mini-beast mask. At the start of the year I created some prototypes and then used these to create some printable templates and stencils that the public would be able to use to design their own mini-beast mask
I created 5 prototypes to begin with, an ant, a spider, a bee, a butterfly, and a ladybird. They were all slightly different style of mask covering the face in different ways, sometimes sharing eyes with the mini-beast and sometimes having their own eyes.
Over the three days of workshops the participants enjoyed being able to create they own designs using the printed templates or card stencils, using glue guns and other tools along with a variety of materials to create their own individual mask.
Mosaic
Mosaic is an interesting way to create a unique pattern and originates in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. It has always been loved by artists as it is a chance to explore colour and shape, sometimes made with specific tiles and often up cycled from other broken tiles and ceramics. We used some small glass tiles in various shapes to create a small mosaic image on a coaster, the tiles were glued to a plywood base just using PVA glue and then grouted using normal grout from a DIY store. Once the grout was dried, the coasters were cleaned up and more grout added if needed.
Everyone seemed to enjoy the activity of designing their coaster and having a nice finished product at the end.
The Mirror at Life
In June 2023 when I started a temporary contract at the Life Science Centre for the summer, I was tasked with making a frame for a window in the space to make it look like an old ornate mirror. There was much card used, even more glue from the hot glue gun and lots of shaping of the card to create the frame. Despite the activity finishing in September, the frame has stayed up and being dressed for halloween and had a giant dragon installed in it.
Festival Headdresses
Using templates and a variety of materials we made some Festival Headdresses, the participants took the time to colour in and then add on various materials like feathers and stickers.
Crooked Halo Crafts and Design 