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.