I’ve just started a series of family learning workshops at Ham House - we will be creating a permanent timeline exhibit to celebrate the house’s 400th anniversary. For the first session I made badges for everyone, randomly allocating them a character from the house’s fascinating history.

I’ve been doing a series of education workshops at The Mall Galleries with different visiting schools from Lambeth. The children get to talk about paintings, choose a character from a piece of work in the current exhibition, then make their own book featuring doors into other worlds. The children have been so enthusiastic, it’s been great working there.

I’ve been designing family activities for visitors to Osterley House. There are six different activities altogether: for this one I designed a set of rubber stamps inspired by the Robert Adam architecture, and visitors will be able to mix them up to design their own buildings.

I’ve spent the last week working at St Paul’s C of E primary school, Hook, creating two large textile collage panels to celebrate the school’s 150th anniversary. The red words are the school’s values. Everyone from year 1 up to year 6 took part, and I completed the work by building two wooden frames and stretching the fabric over them for a neat finish.

Today was the end of the School Arts Partnership project with the National Trust at Morden Hall Park. I was the lead artist for the whole school year, and today we had an exhibition to celebrate, featuring the lovely paintings the children made in the park in May,

and the lanterns from the floating lantern festival last November,

as well as the mosaics we made last term. Then all the children from the two schools involved - Wimbledon Chase Primary and Cricket Green special needs school in Mitcham - wrote their memories of the project on a postcard and tied them to a tree with a ribbon:

In the evening Wimbledon Chase Primary School organised a special event for parents, also attended by the press and the Mayor of Merton, to mark the end of the project. It was a lovely evening - there was a documentary film, poems and singing, and then I had to sign autographs! A great way to finish the project - thanks to everyone involved.

I’ve been putting together another demonstration book, this time for a workshop plan I am writing for the education programme at the  Mall Galleries. It’s on a theme of doors, and children will each choose and create a character, then make a book with open-able doors to lead to a series of adventures. Back at school after the gallery visit, the children can write the narrative to go with the visuals they have created.

Today was the last day of the library project at Singlegate Primary School in Colliers Wood. All term I’ve been working on Friday afternoons with a group of children from different classes, making an installation for the library - including a wall hanging complete with collage nests, a flock of papier mache birds (I specially like this one with the smart scarf):

and - since the project is in the library - a set of hand-made books about the birds:

They were a great group and I will miss them all!

Today was the launch of the story boat at Morden Hall Park - and the end of the London Voices project with the National Trust. Sculptor Simon Kent carved the boat in panels of solid oak from Sherwood Forest, working to designs I produced using the drawings, prints and poems created by the families from Liberty School in Mitcham during the workshop sessions earlier in the year. The launch was a great event, with over 250 people coming along throughout the day, and joining in with activities like making mini-boats (Suha, above, made three despite having a broken wrist!), playing eels out and listening to exciting and adventurous tales on the boat with storyteller Diana.

It was a great way to end a project that has been wonderful to work on from start to finish. The boat looked amazing and it was so exciting to see it finished for the first time. Simon also made five free-standing sculptures to act as bases for the game ‘Eels Out’ - below is the vole. We also presented the letterpress posters featuring the families’ poems that I made a few weeks ago with Ross and Jon from JMG Studio - each family and everyone involved was given one to keep as a special souvenir of the project.

I finished the macaw project today with 22 Y6 pupils from North London. They had great fun creating interesting textures on coloured paper with acrylic paint and hanging them up to dry. The next day they used them to create collage-based, Japanese-bound story books inspired by the visit of Roberta the macaw. Their work was brilliant and the children really enjoyed the project, and didn’t even want to stop for break-time. ArtisanCam will be showing online film of the project later in the year.

Only a couple more workshops this term then I will be preparing in earnest for my solo show in October at The Old Sweet Shop. It’s called ‘Compendium’ and will be inspired by games and ways of playing.

I’ve been up to Brondesbury Park for the project with ArtisanCam: this is Roberta, the lovely macaw from London Zoo, who came to visit the school - she waves her claw and says ‘hello’. The children loved her and drew some great pictures in pastel, then got to work on their books.