Birds of summer

Today was our final public workshop at the Green Patch. We were really pleased to welcome back Lily and her mum again, and 3 new families joined us too.

Lots of activity today, we had signs to finish off and the children really enjoyed painting them.

We also made birds, upcycling plastic packaging into beautiful colourful bird collages which we will perch in the trees around the Green Patch.

Quinn enjoyed exploring and playing on the mud piles!

and everybody sat on the blue mat to make their birds.

Here is the team with their finished birds!

 

Carole and Jo also did some more work on their installation for the summer house.

We are designing some new windows for the summer house, and Jo had made a prototype. It fitted perfectly! Next, we started thinking about how we might redesign the windows in the door panels too.

 

Carole had been busy making other parts out of acrylic for the installation too, and had been finishing off the bunting made in our earlier workshops, sewing down the edges and putting on the backing fabric. They're looking really stunning now!

Well, that's it for our public workshops for now, because we need some time to get all the work made in our workshops installed around the Green Patch site! And we need to make some more work of our own - so keep following the blog for more updates soon -

 - and of course for news of the final celebration when we will invite everybody back to see all the work hanging, installed and bringing colour and art to the Green Patch!

Day 5 - sun, signs and a ceiling

The end of our first week at the Green Patch, and it has been busy!

We had more visitors today, despite it being scorching hot! But our trusty gazebo gave us shelter. A very pleasant day making more bunting and printing signs.

Bunting: a scarecrow, a ladybird and a cat

We also did some more work towards our installation to go in the summer house. The idea keeps on developing, this time we masked out shapes on a panel to be mounted on the ceiling.

Work resumes again on Monday! 

Day Four - a weather installation

Today we started making parts for our weather installation for the summer house at the Green Patch allotments.

Weather has been a big feature in our residency so far, it's a physical struggle at times to create work in gusty wind, sudden heavy rain and hot sunshine, all of which we have experienced in one week! Of course weather is important for growing and the allotment too, and every day we are all hoping for enough rain to refill the depleted water butts, followed by hopes for enough sunshine to ripen everything, wishing for that perfect balance and making constant adaptations here and there to protect plants from drying out or from becoming waterlogged.

Therefore we felt that we should create an installation in the summer house to reflect aspects of weather. We spent the day cutting, heat bending and machining pieces of acrylic sheet. We'll start installing the pieces tomorrow.

 

Day Two, poetry and signs

Today we wrote poetry and turned scrap wood into colourful signs for our favourite parts of the Green Patch.

Art in the Summer House

We are doing a lot of work in preparation for our residency at the Green Patch allotments in August. Our publicity flyer is now out - please take a look at our public workshop dates, and we hope you can join us!

The Green Patch is on Valley Walk, Kettering, here's a map of its location.


View Larger Map

We hope to have a celebration, exhibition and barbeque event in September as a result of the project - more details to follow!