27 Feb 2017
This morning we had a quiet session, but a very busy session.
Our friends at Endeavour are coordinating a collaborative project to celebrate International Women’s Day on Wednesday 8th March, with the theme ‘Butterflies’. So today’s activity was to create or colour a butterfly using either a paint by numbers picture or try felting a butterfly on to a felt background.
We also had two extra tables; one for those who wanted to experiment with iPad apps, and another for those who wanted to gossip.
There was some beautiful colouring in taking place on the colouring table, and the small group who wanted to try felting made a great start to their felting work, and will hopefully be finishing their masterpieces next week.
Those who were experimenting with the iPads played both Pottery HD and Magic Piano by Smule. It was lovely to see one of the group members helping another with the Pottery HD app – a great result!
This afternoon at Young At Heart ULO we had a creative session; colouring in a paint by numbers picture of butterflies followed by pancakes made by our lovely friends from Endeavour.
At the start of the session, we placed our drinks order with Cafe In The Park next door and got ourselves comfortable around the table. I handed out some printouts of a paint by numbers picture of butterflies and found out the colouring pencils, felt tip pens and crayons. We went around the group asking people to tell us an emotion before we all chose a colour that we thought represented that emotion. There were 8 colours in total.
We then worked through the numbers in the pictures, colouring them in with our chosen colours while chatting and listening to some background music. The colouring took about 35-40 minutes, after which time our friends from Endeavour made us some fresh pancakes.
Rory helped Mary to make the pancake mix before they helped Richard to fry the pancakes for the group. Both young men had a go at tossing the pancakes, which was great fun. Even I had a go at tossing a pancake (it was my first time)!
Next week we will be doing something a little more physical…
This afternoon was quieter than previous weeks at our Thornaby group, but we didn’t let that stop us! After starting with our orientation exercises and sharing our good news stories, we quickly found ourselves discussing our theme for this week – Endeavour’s International Women’s Day Butterfly project. Like the other Young At Heart ULO groups this week, Thornaby participants were tasked with creating their own butterflies.
Sadly, I was unable to find my knitting needle set, so knitting butterflies was not an option. However, I did distribute a simple knitting pattern to anyone who wanted to try knitting butterflies at home instead. We also chatted about origami butterflies, which had been suggested by Ann but, unfortunately, making origami butterflies was a lot more complicated that any of us had imaged. This left us with either paint by numbers or felting. The whole group chose to do paint by numbers.
As you will know, if you have read previous blog posts about paint by numbers activities, I like to do paint by numbers with a bit of a twist. Our theme for the group today was ‘Spring Time’, so we went around the group asking participants to name 8 things that they like about spring time and then to associate that ‘thing’ with a colour so that the image represented all of the things each person liked about spring time. Suggestions included daffodils, Easter, grass, light nights and birds.
Only a small number of participants completed their pictures, but most of those who didn’t finish colouring their picture decided to take it home to take their time over it.
