a workshop with julie

saturday morning, cold, a bit damp, very november. definitely a porridge and golden syrup for breakfast day. the other distinguishing thing about this saturday was it being a peer to peer meeting day and also a workshop run by julie clare day.

i don't get to go to workshops that often, so despite feeling a little under the weather and just a little cold i assembled the items prescribed and ventured out to st john's chapel where a beaming julie warmly greeted me and i immediately knew that the journey was worth it and this workshop was going to be fun.

julie was running the workshop for transition belper and i found it very interesting to learn about the origins and uses of bio-plastics.

once we covered that and had a very lovely cup of tea we all moved onto the really fun bit playing with stuff from the kitchen cupboard.  the image above shows the phase where we played with milk, food colour and washing up liquid.  we also played with a cornflour and water combination.  i got quite into watching how the liquid rapidly turned into a solid and as quick back into a liquid.

after the excitement of that we all had an opportunity to make one of the several tree decorations made from paper that julie had on show.  i chose the one that i couldn't easily work out how it was made.  while we made the decs we'd chosen, julie effortlessly chaired a really interesting discussion.

i thank transition belper for facilitating julie to run such an excellent workshop.  i hope that julie gets more opportunities to run more of these style of workshops as she made accessible bits of physics and chemistry and i certainly left with some ideas to try out in my own kitchen / studio.