Bell Farm Year 1 get our Christmas Workshops up and running

Our Christmas Exhibition is coming along, we have had the first of our Schools workshops kindly sponsored by Walton Charities.

year 1 at Bell Farm did us proud with these 'pop up' christmas cards which will be part of our 'Jolly Christmas Postman' inspired festivities!

Oh oh heaven: Licence to copy!

As we were beavering away on the Jolly Christmas Postman project, Emily had a fantastic email from Random House, publishers of the book, to say that they have been in touch with Allan and Janet Ahlberg who have given us permission to use and adapt their illustrations. It's really exciting to be supported like this, and we hope that Riverhouse will reach a wider audience as a result.

Since then, I've continued work on the giant popup project, spending last weekend building a lightweight plywood frame to form the two opening pages.

The right hand one will be fixed, and the left will hinge open (see last week's post for a vague idea of how this will happen). The frame will be strengthened when we add the mechanism and all the popup decoration. Once it's finished and looks like a book, all this will be hidden.

As you can see, it's quite sizable. This was causing some grief in Ed's House of Dust (you might think it's "just" a garage, but trust me - Ed's House of Dust is a very accurate name), because there are no commercially available hinges that will do the job. After some head scratching, 2 large mugs of tea and some research on YouTube, I came up with a solution: and have made plywood hinges using skateboard bearings to ensure smooth operation.

They took a while to make, but the final product is fantastic, and I'm confident that we have a working solution.

While I've been getting covered in sawdust, my co-conspirator Merrian has been working on the design for the popup scene that will be revealed when the book opens. We hope to have sketches and a little model to share with the rest of the team next week, so watch this space for updates.

A musical weekend

Amazing weekend of music here, from the young performers rocking the joint on Friday night raising money for RefuAid,

...to the classical sounds of wonderful cellist Hannah Sloane on Saturday and finally on Sunday a packed folk crowd turned out to hear Rachael McShane and the Cartographers..

The Jolly Popup Challenge

For a couple of years, Emily has been suggesting that we incorporate a popup book into our Christmas exhibition and this is the year that I've finally found a really good excuse to make one.

But not just any old popup book (and "any old" is pretty complex anyway), oh no, we're going large. Think big, add a bit, and you're probably there. We're creating a "book" with 8 foot / 2.4 metre high pages, with a mechanism that will open and close the book when a visitor presses a button.

We're in the planning stages now. There are a few challenges to overcome: learning the dark art of "paper engineering" so we can design and build the contents of the book, the creation of a fool-proof mechanism to power it all, and then the actual build.

This bit has always been an entertaining succession of last-minute panics, late nights, changes of plan, running out of supplies at the 11th hour and crucially, LOTS of fun.

There's been a reasonable amount of kitchen table fiddling to prove that the general idea is workable. I just have to work out how to scale it up from a folded sheet of A4 card...



For now, I'm concentrating on the mechanics. The idea is to make the book open using a device called a linear actuator. This is basically an electric motor that drives a worm gear, converting rotary motion into linear motion. That's simple: bought one on eBay for a few pounds.

We want visitors to experience the book opening and closing, so it needs control. This is coming from a micro-controller which can control a series of relays. At the touch of a button / pull of a tab, this will turn on power for long enough for the "book" to open, wait for a while, and then reverse the power so the book closes. Then it goes into a zen-like trance while it waits for another nudge.

The weird contraption below is the prototype mech. If it looks vaguely familiar in shape, then you've spent too much time watching JCBs in action.



Simple, eh?

The Jolly Christmas Postman - the beginnings

Lovely Day with Sarah Levy, our jewellery tutor and Anne Yasikov, gallery admin volunteer, beginning to work on decorations for our Christmas Exhibition.

This year we are using The Jolly Christmas Postman by Allan and Janet Ahlberg as our inspiration, as that is also our family Christmas Show (adapted by Story Pocket Theatre).

We decided to use the Pop Up and Pull Out nature of the book as a vehicle and various people have started work on that.... Klara Smith has started working on a pull out scene, and Ed Butcher has begun to create a 'self opening' book - he'll be keeping us informed as to his progress on this blog.

Local primary schools will be creating small pop up cards to their favourite fairy-tale characters which will 'fly' around the gallery out of a giant post box... Brooklands college students are working on a 2D animation project after half term... so all very exciting.

We thought we would decorate the walls with cardboard doors with windows, through which you can see the silhouette of various fairy tale characters.

So today was Day 1 of trying to see how this might work... and very successful it was too... lots of ideas for creating different windows and doors.. letter boxes for kids to post christmas cards to..

From Budapest to Africa last weekend

What a busy weekend.
We had a sell out audience for an exhilarating evening with the Budapest Cafe Orchestra, featuring violinist Chris Garrick. They entertained the packed crowd with some incredible musicianship as well as a healthy dose of fun!

Click here to see a taster (wobbly) of the evening!



And on Saturday we let BANTU Arts (www.bantuarts.co.uk) take over the venue for our annual African Arts Day. We think it's the 5th one we have hosted and it didn't disappoint! We had 3 drumming workshops, 2 Art and Craft workshops, 1 dance workshop, craft stalls, food and a fantastic performance... which got us all up dancing by the end!

A clip of the performance is available on our facebook page, via this link

Tony Denton (BarnArmy choreographer caught on camera)

Upstairs in the office we suddenly noticed that Tony, our street dance tutor, unaware of the security feed, was warming up in the barn!
It's ok we've asked him if we can share!

Tony Dancing!

A Day in the life of..... Lunchtime Concert Day

9.30am Arrive (admittedly slightly late) to find the fire-alarms being tested, cafe beginning to fill up.. the gardeners using leaf blowers which are sending clouds of dust and leaves under the door and into the foyer. In amongst this, the piano tuner is attempting to coax the piano to performance fitness. Not ideal!

9.45 A couple of hours of mayhem, with phones, noise, classes, printing programs and flyers, checking numbers for tickets and lunches.... and all the time attempting to catch up with emails and suchlike before the first of the public arrive for the lunchtime concert food!

11.30am - Piano tuner done! We start to usher early arrivals upstairs to admire the exhibition by Phoenix Textiles.

12 noon - Lunchtime Concert arrivals
As we are a small team and many of us have volunteered/worked here for many years.. we tend to get know many of our visitors personally and can cater for their own particular needs. For example one lovely elderly man who has come to lunchtime concerts for donkey's years, he called late this morning on the off-chance that we could fit him in for lunch and the concert, anxious to make me fully aware of his 96 years and his difficulty in moving about (we have a special chair for him and a parking space but that is already taken).

All has been going relatively smoothly, give or take a slight lack of change for the bar, until our elderly friend arrives and promptly reverses into the flower bed. Screams from our Front of House Team alerting the entire neighbourhood to the problem and scaring a couple of kids along the way. The solution, - park the car for him, while he is taken inside and presented with a lovely hot chicken pie! After parking his car and checking he is alright, peace has been restored.

12.30pm
Next up a conversation about our Community Garden Project we're trying to get off the ground, literally. We're in the planning stages and it's taken about 2 years to get as far as we have, which is pretty much nowhere. The problem is that neither EBC or Surrey CC are entirely sure who owns the land that we want to turn into a garden..... so stuck at the first hurdle really.

1pm - Donna arrives and spends the next half hour sorting out the keys in her keyboard which she had taken apart yesterday to clean it. We had a security scare last week on her computer and had to call the fraud department... I don't think this is what they meant when they said clean out the computer but never mind!

Flute music floats up the stairs and we have a lovely hour of peace!

2pm - Concert finishes, happy people flood out, I bring our elderly friend's car round so he can weave his way home and we settle into our usual work pattern.

3.30pm start setting up for the children's art class with the wonderful Imogen Andrews. These are our smallest children and they really love their Wednesdays!

4pm meeting about setting up an accessible film/dance/music club with older children with Autism in mind. We have fixed on a date to try a film showing - now to find some funding so we can offer it for free..

And so the end of another day at Riverhouse... apart from Mama Vox ladies choir who will meet later on this evening....

New Brochure for the Spring

It's always challenging juggling the programme.
We try to get a good mixture of theatre, comedy, magic, music and children's events. We think we have it all in place and then somebody wants to change a date and it's all thrown into disarray...

But today we are pretty much set for the Spring and there are lots of exciting things coming up.

We are forming a new relationship with the Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham, and they are sending us two exhibitions this spring... including some beautiful Chagall prints.. so we are very excited about that. There will be limited edition prints for sale, have a look at their website, they have some very prestigious artwork.

https://www.goldmarkart.com/

lovely!!!!

Also, we are very very happy to say that the lovely Tony Hawks will be coming back to bring the film he made of his book Playing the Moldovans at Tennis.... and he says he'll do a Q&A! Now that's going to be fun! He and Chesney Hawkes entertained us over the summer with a fabulous evening in 'One Hit Wanderers'. Watch this space to see when tickets go on sale.... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9myu-iqhWYE

A lovely Day at Riverhouse

Somedays it's the best job in the world sitting here with the sun shining in and volunteers happily sitting in the courtyard tucking in to some good food after a morning of gardening.

The Gallery is full to bursting with fabulous work by the Phoenix Textiles group, who have exhibited here previously but never quite like this before!

Our volunteers got a good day for it this time. Last time our gardening day was rained off, so there were happy faces all round this time.