CHRISTMAS CRAFT FAIR

The Christmas craft fair was a great success. Ingrid Maugham held a workshop on making large-scale Christmas decorations, which all the participants enjoyed immensely. There were nine stalls in all, selling goods ranging from greeting cards to textiles, jewellery to exotic foods. All the craftspeople that held stalls had a successful day. Sally Pinder ran a children’s craft workshop throughout the day, and it proved to be a big hit. She assisted the children to make brightly decorated post boxes, ready to receive all of Santa’s letters. They looked wonderful, and all who took part in the workshop seemed to be very pleased with the results. Pete Beresford provided the entertainment at the event, which added to the atmosphere, and made the day really enjoyable for all.

The Young Enterprise Club from the high school set up and ran the café at the event, and served refreshments. Craftsperson Maureen Preen held a Weaving demonstration, which was well received by all the attendees.

WELSH LANGUAGE EVENTS

A number of successful events were organised in conjunction with Sheela Hughes (Community Development Officer) including a series of Creative writing workshops with Cyril Jones which resulted in a book launched at the National Eisteddfod. At the time of writing this year’s events are about to start.

LLANFYLLIN HIGH SCHOOL WORKSHOPS

A series of open access workshops took place at Llanfyllin High School during February and March. These included Stained Glass with Mirage Glass, Illustrating with Lorna Hussey, Felt-making with Francine Isaacs and Life Drawing with Angus Ogilvy.

LLWYN TEG MURAL

Artist Tony Wainwright along with five students from Llanfyllin High School and Dux the youth worker created a wonderful mural for Llwyn Teg Residential Home in Llanfyllin to enhance an area where residents can sit outside. The students spent time talking to the residents prior to the project to get ideas for content and an official opening took place in July where Mayoress Enid Evans officiated and the students were presented with small gifts from Llwyn Teg.

LLANFYLLIN SUMMER PLAYSCHEME

Artist Sally Pinder created a wonderful mural over the two days she worked with Playscheme attendees at the Youth & Community Centre. It was a difficult brief, involving as it did two groups of around 20 children aged 4 - 7 and 8 - 12. The result is now a fixture in the Club Room at the Youth & Community Centre and has been much admired.

CURIAD MACHYNLLETH

CURIAD are a teenage singing group led by well known vocal tutor Roxane Smith. This year we funded a series of workshops for them and contributed towards the production of a CD. In addition to the agreed arrangements the group also put on their own workshop in a school, did performances for International Women’s Day and a CD launch party.

BADGERS CLUB

Sally Pinder worked with a group of 15 children from Llanfyllin and the surrounding villages on various painting techniques over a three-week period in order to enable the children to attain achievement badges.

EISTEDDFOD GENEDLAETHOL NATIONAL EISTEDDFOD
We were pleased to be able to share a stall at this Year’s Eisteddfod with Voluntary Arts Wales. It provided a good opportunity to network with other arts companies throughout Wales, and to encourage new membership. We also part sponsored a project with 8 primary schools, which was a series of banners depicting the lives and legends linked to the dark ages in Mathrafal. The artist was Hilary Roberts and the results (see pictures) received much acclaim at the Eisteddfod. We also provided artists for the Powys County Council ‘Turning a New Leaf’ project and Welsh Language Street Names project.

EXHIBITION

We have recently collaborated with Llanfyllin High School to give Year 8 pupils the chance to organise, set up, publicise and run an exhibition of the fine work they did with artist Cefyn Burgess on chapels and work on panels displayed at the Eisteddfod.