Live at Home/Reminiscence session

Earlier this week (Thursday 13th March) we visited Julie Maude and the Live at Home group at the Great Horton Village Hall in Bradford. We arrived as the group were about to have their lunch and had a cuppa and chatted to them during their meal. We told them a little about ourselves and why we were visiting them and they seemed interested in getting involved with the project. They told us about a project they were currently working on where they were knitting squares to be turned into throws for the pews in one of the churches involved in the winter shelter scheme. This existing engagement with Inn Churches is reassuring as it shows they are practically engaged with helping the homeless already. It was lovely to sit and chat with them, as they discovered we were textiles students they began to tell us all kinds of stories about the mills they'd worked in. One of the men, Jim, had managed weaving mills all around the world! It was fascinating to hear about all the things he had done a reassuring to find that they had such a keen interest in textiles as a lot of them had spent their working lives in this area.

After lunch we spoke to Julie and ran through our idea to do a workshop with the group where they would stitch into fabric swatches and how this would strongly embed a feeling of love into the project. She responded very positively and told us how the group were very interested in crafts and loved making things. However she did also mention how the men may not want to get involved in embroidery and this is something we're going to have to consider and adapt to in order to encourage everyone to get engaged with the concept. We also ran through how we were going to create packs to give out at University to explain how we were getting other communities involved with the project. Julie then mentioned that a lot of the group have a lot of spare time during the week and that they enjoy being given something productive to do at home, especially something which is rewarding. One lady had been so taken with creating the knitted patches to make the throws for the church that she went home and made 150 in a single week! We're now considering how we could roll out the packs to be given to members of this community too. It all seems very positive and I feel like we're going to generate a lot of love filled pieces through this process!

The next step was to discuss logistics with Julie, we needed to pick her brains to find out when the group met and where we could fit our workshops around their current planned activities and our individual timetables! The schedule for the Live at Home sessions is:

Monday - exersise classes and bingo.
Julie mentioned that this may be a ideal time to host a workshop as those who don't take part in the exersise classes can sometimes feel left out and it would be nice to have a activity for them to take part in. The session runs from 10am - 2.30pm and Julie mentioned it would be preferable for us to do the workshop before lunch.

Wednesday
Julie said that she'd really like us to run a session on this day as it has a lot of people attending it who really enjoy crafts. It would again be preferable for us to run the workshop before lunch. This means we could do it between 10.45am and 12.30pm.

Thursday
The available slot for this day (before lunch) would be 10am-12.15pm.

Julie told us that a hours workshop would probably be best to maintain engagement and that we could come on any day, we just needed to drop her a text before and that not much notice was needed. This is fantastic news as we've got a lot of deadlines coming up and it provides us with the flexibility we need to work around these.

A lady then arrived to run a reminiscence session with the group. She had visited the library and picked up 'reminiscence packs' which contained various items from 'back in the day'. The group then looked at the objects and discussed what they were, telling stories about them from when they were younger. The majority of the objects were a mystery to me but it was fantastic seeing how they triggered memories from decades ago and how they all seemed to light up telling their funny anecdotes! Seeing this reiterated how a story can be captured bringing emotional value to a inanimate object. It was really encouraging to see as it's what we're aiming to achieve.

Just before we left Jim caught us to chat again, we told him we were planning to come back to do a workshop and when we told him about the plans to do stitch (along with something more aimed at the men that we were yet to think of!) he told us to 'remember he's 92!'. After leaving the session I mentioned to Rhi and Claire that we were going to have to adapt the equipment for the workshops and the envelopes being given out at these, needles would have to be bigger, with bigger eyes and it would be ideal if we could thread them up before going in order to help things run more smoothly.

The three of us also discussed our upcoming deadlines and have agreed to take a week off from meeting up for this project in order to elevate some pressure and give us one less thing to think about over the next seven days. The aim after this is to focus on creating the envelopes to be given out at University and after the workshops.

I feel like the projects progressing well although I really want to get cracking giving out the envelopes and doing the sessions so there's some physical evidence of what we've been up to! Looking back at my blog I can see we've done a lot of work generating ideas and researching for this project but I can't wait to actually see some products being developed!