a huge kettle always simmering

Yesterday Phil and I spent a happy and productive morning at Four acre Library, with a small but highly motivated group of participants. We worked on the embroidered tablecloth with an image
of a brown teapot, and writing sharing the tradition of teadrinking...

Sid spoke with great affection and humor about his mam and dad,  he wrote on the tablecloth: "It was that strong we called it black treacle, there were spoons of it heaped like logs floating''. and "an open grate a huge kettle always simmering. She'd cook immaculate."

Mary shared her memories of growing up on a farm: "Nothing tastes so good as sitting under a haystack or stook of corn and drinking that tea''

One of the challenges in working in a drop in session is you never know how many people will be joining you- an empty room or and overcrowded one or a mad rush with everyone turning up 5 minutes before the finish time. This time the library was quite quiet, so our group was small. But the conversation blossomed and kept blossoming. Our pair of participants really engaged in the subject matter, the conversation and the artworks. They'd both been to previous sessions, and seemed keen to join us again in future ones - a tentative start in creating a new creative group in Four Acre. One of the joys of group work is setting an activity up and then watching it take of and have a life of its own. Here the encounters were social as well as creative - our two main participants were strangers at the start, but soon discovered that they were brought up in the same neighborhood and shared many memories, the atmosphere turned into a little party.

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