Live at Home Session 3

On Wednesday we ran our final Live at Home session!

We're a dab hand at getting everything set up and ready to go now so the preparation of the workshop ran smoothly! We did have a few reluctant members this week asking 'is this just the same as last week?' however Julie reassured us that some members are just reluctant to get involved with anything and it wasn't to do with our workshop. Having been told this I'm pretty impressed we successfully got them to engage in both last weeks session and today's! I think this reflects positively on the activity and our concept as there must have been something which encouraged the women to actually take part!

The drawing templates were used more this week, however a orange highlighter appeared from somewhere and took over the designs! I guess this shows us that we should have perhaps considered including colour however we were concerned about the aesthetics of the pieces and how a miss-mash of colours could be detrimental to the end design - although our project is very concept led the end result still needs to be aesthetically pleasing! It was good to see they were getting involved and getting something out of the workshop but having looked at the amount of templates which were filled in we don't have enough to generate a large enough variety of samples to be able to create unique objects with them. Therefore we have decided not to turn these into sublimation prints and are happy knowing that they individuals completing them got something out of the activity.

The rest of the group were really happy to carry on working on the samples and I think they began to see more clearly what it was we were aiming to achieve. We took them some chocolates as a 'Thank-you' for taking part in the project and being so lovely and welcoming. I think it's safe to say they went down a treat!!

It's been really busy at the Live at Home sessions for Julie the last few weeks due to them being understaffed so today was the first chance we've really had to get some feedback from her about the sessions. She told us she thought they'd gone really well and everyone seemed to really enjoy them. She also reassured us not to worry about the ones who didn't want to take part as some of them are always reluctant to get involved in any activities. I'm glad she told us that as I was slightly concerned that they weren't engaging because of something we'd done wrong! I felt a little sad when we'd left as we'd met some really lovely people and had some fantastic laughs with them. They asked us to go visit again which we all agreed we'd be very happy to do, it was really nice to engage with a community I wouldn't normally be involved with.

When we got back to Huddersfield we headed to Rhi's house to divide up all the samples we'd generated. Out of curiosity I counted all the samples and we were all amazed when we realised we had almost 40 ready to be incorporated into items for the Home Starter Packs!! The fact that enough people had taken time to work on the project with us was a little overwhelming and I'm honestly so happy with the results and I think it's really achieving our concept! It looks like each gift tag with have a good few names of people who have contributed to making that item which will really demonstrate the time and care taken to create each piece. We discussed exactly what we're going to make today and have decided to go for cushions and draft excluders as the patchwork style we will be using lends itself well to these items. They're also associated with safety and comfort which are important qualities we'd like to capture to contrast to the other items in the packs which are purely practical.