Arty Crafty

I am continually amazed by the number of brilliant creatives who live in our neighbourhood. Artists, sculpture-ers, singers, seamstresses, writers, you name it we appear to have them. The best part of this is that they all appear to be willing to share their knowledge, especially with the younger members of our community.

Earlier in the year the delightful Cathy Judge, singer and sculptress (but maybe not at the same time) held an Open Studio event and having never attended anything like this before we strapped on our brave boots and wandered up the road to her home and studio. To be honest I knew the visit was going to be a success as soon as we rang the door bell. Cathy has THE best door bell with a proper, working wall mounted pull and a dozen ringing bells mounted in the hall, very Downton and is just ace.

Cathy is clearly a pro at making people feel welcome as she chatted to the children and told them all about her sculptures but then pottered off to make us drinks letting us have a look at her work at our leisure. We made our way through to her studio and there she was generous enough to offer the children some clay so they could have a go at creating something to take home. Anyway nearly 2 hours later (sorry Cathy, we only meant to stay half an hour) we walked home with a board full of sculptures, a better understanding of the process each statue goes through and, best of all, a new friend.

Today’s summer holiday activity was paper making!

The lovely Sally and Ele, both wonderful artists in their own right, joined forces and ran a paper making workshop. So off we trotted quite unsure what to expect and spent a lovely couple of hours in Sally’s back garden mushing paper pulp into frames covered with muslin and j-cloths. We even claimed some artistry by adding petals, leaves and seeds to our creations, obviously inspired by Sally and Ele’s ‘one I made earlier’ examples. We now have soggy, but gorgeous, handmade paper scattered around the house whilst it goes through the drying process. It will be interesting to see if they all stick and if they do I think some will be given the honour of a frame for our wall.