First DoodlePippin workshops....

Well, last night was the first DoodlePippin workshop, courtesy of my lovely friend Suzanne Holloway. She managed to create space in her dining room for 12 people to sit around a table, have access to three pasta machines for conditioning clay, and to swing their (very sharp) clay blades around while drinking Prosecco and talking non-stop.

It was a great evening and people made unexpectedly beautiful things (despite my rather cack-handed instruction). It's brilliant to see people suddenly understand the "reduce and recombine" technique and how kaleidoscoping works with polymer clay canes.

I wish I'd got the cookie cutters out earlier so that people could start making keyrings, pendants, buttons and fridge magnets earlier, so that's something I'll do differently next time. And people said they could have understood more easily if I'd had ready-made examples of the zipper, bullseye and candy-roll canes for them to see. Plus maybe a few templates for the 7cm x 7cm squares they were asked to make, and the bracelet blanks we ended up making.

Unfortunately most of the time at workshops we're not going to be able to 'cure' the pieces people on workshops make before they take them home (no time, or no venue insurance for a mini-oven!) so I need to come up with a foolproof strategy for people taking raw clay pieces home for curing (instructions and some sort of container for the pieces) so that's the next challenge.

Anyway, it was a lovely evening and thanks to Sian, Suzanne, Karen, Kate, Sally, Tracey, Jo, Clare, Lisa, Amelia and Vanessa for bearing with me with such good humour...!

If you're interested in trying your hand at this amazing art medium, check out my workshops page here. More dates being added all the time - I would love to see you there!