Artists in Residence

There's been great excitement amongst The Wednesday Group recently. Last week we were the 'Summer House Artists' at Blue-Ginger Gallery in Stiffords Bridge, Worcestershire. From last Wednesday until today, various members of the group have been ensconced in the summer house next to the Kune Kune pigs and just a stone's throw away from the gallery itself.

Thursday was 'group day', when six of us spent the day working on a group challenge. It was a gloriously sunny start to the day so we decided to start things off in true Wednesday Group style...

...with a cuppa...

...and cake! Lois (our resident foodie and baker of fabulous treats) unveiled a batch of carrot cake muffins and with great whoops of delight we all tucked in!

Cake is a very important element of The Wednesday Group! Here are Anni, Lindsay and Ann enjoying tea and cake in the sunshine.

We started the day at a leisurely pace. It's definitely a good idea to start a group challenge refreshed, fed and watered!

The gallery's resident robin came to see us throughout the day and enjoyed sharing our cake and lunch with us.

The challenge for the day was to create creatures in a textile version of the game 'consequnces'. Here's Kathleen (organiser extraordinaire and mastermind behind the challenege) explaining what we were going to do.

We each started out with a stuffed calico shape and were given an hour to create a face before passing it on to the next person, who had to add on the limbs. Finally, the emerging creatures were passed on to someone else who had the job of adding the final embellishments.

Whilst I was panicking about how to start (!), I turned to Julie Arkell's book for some inspiration.

Julie creates such wonderfully quirky creatures. I love the way she incorporates stitched wording and vintage fabrics into her work.

Here are Lois and Ann busily at work. It went surprisingly quiet at times, as we all worked frantically to get things finished in the time we had!

Here's Anni hard at work. She used felt and hand stitching to create the face on her creature (which you can see below, back row on the left).

Stage one complete! Mine's the one on right of the back row. I envisaged it being a rabbit, but I couldn't add the ears as we could only work on the face and ears weren't allowed at this stage!

To ensure complete randomness, we put all the creatures in a bag and picked one out to work on for stage two. Who knew IKEA bags could be so versatile?!

Lindsay was very pleased to pick out the creature that Lois had started with!

Creature number two for me...and more head scratching on my part as I pondered what on earth I could do! We had an hour and a half to complete the final two stages of the challenge, which I must admit I thought would be plenty of time. How wrong I was, the time just flew by!

Here's what I managed to do in the alloted time. I had thought about turning this creature into a squirrel, but completely ran out of time before I could add the tail!

Here are the creatures at the end of stage two. It was great fun to see them emerging and really interesting to see how we each worked with what the previous person had done.

And finally...here are the end results. What a motley crew they are! The challenge was so much fun. It stretched our creativity, took us out of our comfort boxes, tested our powers of working to a strict timescale and caused many a fit of the giggles.

Here we all are...six happy Wednesday Groupers and our 'Consequentials' (as they've become known).

If you fancy reading more about The Wednesday Group's fun at Blue-Ginger Gallery, pop over to our group blog.