What a blast the past 6 weeks have turned out to be. I've been lucky enough to work with Community Artist Sophy Miles on the Devon County Council Christmas card. The whole project started out by having my name put forward to do the card, of which i totally forgot about until i was told i had been chosen along side Sophy. I'd never met Sophy before so we decided to have a get together and see what we came up with. When she came around, we hit it off immediately and i knew we'd work well together. Sophy has such spirit, enthusiasm, spark, drive, creativity and determination (plus a bit of OCD that kept us....erm, i mean me, on track!). We literally hit the ground running and we carried on 100 miles an hour after that first meeting.

As part of this project, we were to work with a group of pre-school children from the hard hit area of Hatherleigh. We were to run a workshop with about 20-25 children to create an image for the Christmas card. Our planning for this took us into shops to buy the most delicious papers, glitter, sequins, buttons and ribbon that money could buy. Oh what joy it was when we found THE purplest sparkliest paper ever, so beautiful we'd spend a lot of time just staring at it.

When the workshop day arrived, we journeyed into Hatherleigh with Clare, organiser of the whole thing and Angela, Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive :o). All the lovely materials were laid out and we waited for the kids to arrive. Panic set in when only about 10 kids came (weather was absolutely atrocious....boooo). But watching parents working with their children totally made up for it. Some of the children were toddlers and preferred to stick their hands together, rather than stick lovely paper to baubles, snowflakes and christmas trees; but that didn't matter, they had fun!

So eventually we had their decorations and we made some of our own to pad the whole thing out.

We'd decided to make a mini toy theatre with a Winter Wonderland theme. Getting the whole kaboodle to fit together was tricky but we managed (well Sophy did, she got the wood and managed to fashion a base that stood up. My effort would have definitely fell over!)


Then it was time to start the back drop. All i can say is my front room was sea of material, baubles, glitter, snowflakes, glue, paintbrushes, pins, wool and strange little alien creatures (well the last bit was a lie but i reckon there were some gremlins hanging around hiding the scissors, needles and blue-tak when we needed it).

mmm lovely purpley colour. We were ever so excited at what would transform in front of our eyes. Pinning, cutting, shaping, making, pinning, cutting, shaping, making, spinning, putting, maping, paking, pitting, putting, muting, shooting. Our eyes and minds went a bit barmy whilst surrounding by so much STUFF. Arrggggg. We found ourselves laughing our heads off at the smallest of things. I think our sanity was saved only by knowing the outcome would be fantastic. (it also didn't help when we started chatting, we got on SO WELL at least a couple of hours would go by. Envisage n