Creative Days

A beautiful day remembering mum with family and friends, music, flowers and sunshine

23rd July 1935 - 17th May 2026

🤍

Mickalene Thomas inspired faces by our 5-8 year olds

A joyful couple of weeks creating these fabulous collage faces, complete with rhinestones and wood effect vinyl. Also any excuse to draw eyes!! 👀

Landscapes inspired by the fabulous Mickalene Thomas

If you've not heard of her best check her out immediately! She works with yummy materials like enamel and rhinestones and collages using photos and wacky 70s style prints on thick wood panels which we've had a go at replicating here (we used sticky back wood effect vinyl on old boxes) The children loved searching through gardening magazines for pictures to create their landscape designs. And we used bold fabric samples as our backgrounds. Much care and consideration was taken to select and position all the elements, these are sure to look so cool on any wall 😎

Thank you Mickalene for the inspiration 🙏

Artists aged 7-10 years

Vinyl mandalas

I have loved getting to know the 16-18 year old ESOL students over the past few months. They've been visiting and working on various projects with me. Today I worked with them at their college, creating these groovey mandalas on unwanted vinyl, using shapes cut from old magazines. The students were rightly so proud of their work. Stunning results 🤩

Straight line drawings of interiors inspired by Lorna Rose .org.uk

Choose any spot and draw it using only straight lines (rulers and lollipop sticks provided) then enhance with tape and stitches.

Our 90 minute challenge for our teenagers this Saturday ✏🖊📏🧵

Thank you Lorna, they loved it!🙏

Circular weaving

Mastered, revised and enjoyed by all our groups 💙

Weaving, known historically in all great civilisations, is a favourite activity of ours, offering tremendous joy and mindfulness once mastered.  It was wonderful watching the children develop this skill (some for the very first time) and teaching our Teen group how to construct a circular loom from scratch.

Here you see examples from our younger groups. We think they already look great but we know that some of our little artists have been adding more to them at home because they got so into it and because weaving is such a wonderful pass time 😊

Ps We're back this weekend and look forward to welcoming yet more new artists along 💙

Interested in a place for your child? You can message us here or email [email protected] for all the dets!

Snails for All

Snails have literally taken over the Edward Bawden room thanks to marvelous museum curator Victoria Partridge and a group of young artists from Putnoe primary. Their fantastic artwork is hidden in huge drawers (just follow the snail trail...) surrounded by pages from Bawdens book 'Snails for All'. He wrote and illustrated it for his children but the book has just been published and you can now buy a copy of your own from the museum shop.

I absolutely loved working on this project with these children, inspired by such a weird and wonderful book, and it was an absolute pleasure attending the private view yesterday afternoon. Their artwork is not to be missed and the book must be read by all!

Visit without fail 🐌

Alice is very much part of our Teen group now. I'm helping her punch an eye hole in her dove, which is tricky even when you don't have low muscle tone.

She's just one of many children we teach who have additional needs. I don't want to make a big deal about this becuase we don't think it is a big deal. But others may.

Our workshops are for all children which means we open our arms to every child who wishes to join us with as much support as we are able to give. I work closely with parents and our team who share unspoken awareness and acceptance 💕

Our workshops are places where all children are made to feel safe, happy and able. We laugh, we never judge and we help each other, whilst we make great art.

Fridays and Saturdays

📩 [email protected]

Circular weaving for all 🙌

Mastering the art of circular weaving is a wonderful thing and thats exactly what our youngest artists were practising last week. And because we love weaving so much we decided to let all our groups have a go. Our eldest artists had the challenge of stringing up their frame themselves first before they began and we even brought in some hoola hoops so we could get started on some giant weaving too!

They already look so pretty as they slowly grow, but we'll keep adding to them gradually over the next few weeks before they go home 💕

Fridays
4-5pm & 5.30-6.30pm
4-11 year olds

Saturdays
9-10.30am
4-9 year olds
11-12.30pm
9-16 year olds

All

📩 [email protected]

Peace & Love

I felt the urge to create this beautiful and much needed still life as we launched into our summer term, and with a brand new idea up my sleeve...

Our very youngest artists (4-7 year olds) drew first and for about 20 minutes the room was completely silent they were so full of concentration. I'd positioned a second piece of paper then a layer of carbon paper beneath the paper they were drawing on. Next up our Teen group who set to work studying the same still life. I'd removed our younger artists work from the boards but kept the carbon paper in place laying fresh paper on top for them. Once they'd finished... the grand reveal! The carbon paper did its magic and the two works became one on the base layer. I love these completely unpredictable results and I'm now wondering what next...!

Please look out for more examples in our Stories as I couldn't fit them all here, sorry!