Holdahand Project - August 2008

As a practice run and a bit of fun we teamed up with Holdahand Urban Art project, which was being held as part of the Shamania Festival. Holdahand project are aiming to collect a total of 32,000 decorated miniature plaster cast hands painted and decorated, by children and adults. In order to be involved in this exhibition, which will take place in Leeds next year, hands can be purchased for a donation and details need to be registered with www.holdahand.com

Due to the constraints of the weather at Shamania, which quite frankly was extreme, children teamed into the workshop on the first day to keep dry and we were unable to take most registration details due to trying to control a river that was flowing through the tent. If you were at the event and reading this we would be grateful if you could contact us and register your details. When we arrived late at night the day before the start of the event we were almost immediately got stranded in the middle of a field 3ft deep  in mud. After waiting 3 hours for a tractor we finally got towed onto our pitch to put up our tents at 2.00 am in torrential rain.

The following day the weather got worse and gale force winds blew down our workshop and blood was spilled trying to rescue and repair things.

The organisers of Shamania very kindly donated the use of one of their own tents, which was dry and windproof, and we would like to thank them for this. However, the mud was horrendous, and our ability to carry out the workshops was sadly impaired. As a back up plan, we had taken a projector and screen and the evening allowed us to screen films for anyone wanting to stay in the dry that could otherwise had quite a miserable time. In addition to the Holdahand project, we held workshops in card making, marbling and filigree.

The final day arrived, and we had managed to get in excess of 100 hands decorated, for the project. The sun came out a little to late, and a lot of the children had been taken of site 2 days earlier, so numbers were a little limited. After waiting 7 hours for a tow off site we found that the wheels were full to the brim with soggy peat and the steering and tracking on the car had been short of completely wrecked. We were faced with a slow, 12 hour drive, with a car that couldn't exceed 30mph all the way back from Lancashire to the south coast. Sounds like a nightmare? Well, it was a learning experience nonetheless.