One thing I hadn't known was that it was a farm. I found this out when I got there.. and I wasn't exactly pleased! There were said to be 2,000 goats there! We unpacked in our yerts and the had a group meeting with Jamie.
He told us there would be workshops for every pathway, and that we would all be doing something which would enable us to gather primary research, even if we chose not to use it straight away, it could come in use for the FMP project.
I chose textiles, and to start off, we were walking around the large field in which our tents were lined, collecting things which we liked and that looked interesting, such as leaves, twigs, flowers etc. There was also a river there, but as it had been raining pretty badly, it was quite rough so we couldn't get too close.
The objective of collecting these little bits was so that using them, we could develop some techniques that we already knew. However, this proved to be trickier than I thought as we had limited resources.
I used a leaf that I had picked up and brushed some bleach onto the back of it where the veins were prominent. On a piece of paper, I dyed a blue and green square using protein dyes. If you put bleach onto protein dyes, the colour changes.
I didn't really like the way it turned out though, because I like things to be a certain way - I like things to be precise and perfect. When Danielle asked me why I didn't like it, I said I wanted it to be a perfect image as it had blurred slightly, and she said if what I wanted was a perfect image, I could just take a picture. It's not about having a perfect image at the end, its about trying different things.
Also, with one of the flowers I had picked up, I wanted to stick it down onto the page, but the brush I used to glue it down with had blue dye on it and turned the whole flower blue! I liked the effect though.
For more inspiration, (by this point, it was running out), we were allowed to go the farmer's wife's garden. I was told there were flowers there - something I hadn't seen much of. There weren't many there but she had a clean, tidy well kept garden. We weren't allowed to pick any flowers or leaves otherwise I would have ended up picking the whole garden. I took lots of photos so I could work from them when I got back to college.
When we got back to the shammy little shelter we were given to work under, which by the way, was practically like being outside without a shelter, everyone has dispersed (mostly from boredom). I went to see the cute little goats. They came running and almost tried to jump over the fence!
By then, it was tea time - pizza. If I had known mine was going to be cold and half cooked, I would have brought a tin of beans. It was after this that Jamie announced that we were watching a movie in the barn later that evening. As we all gathered to watch the film, it started and was in a different language, and to nobodys surprise, I fell asleep.
Later, we went back to the pizza oven and toasted marshmallows and had leftover pizza - it made a great midnight feast! I was already falling asleep so it was bed time.
Wednesday 26th September - The Second Day
The next morning, I woke in time to get breakfast. We were told that we had a workshop in our pathway areas. As mine was textiles, Danielle told us that we would be making something wearable - I had only done this once before, and it was due to that I was doing textiles. I had really enjoyed it and wanted to do something like that again. By looking at the people in my group, they all seemed to know what they were doing pretty well. I felt kind of intimidated as I was also working on my own. How was I supposed to make a wearable garment by looking at the surrounding nature for inspiration? Also, to make matters worse, we only had a couple of hours to do this because it would then be time to pack. I'm the kind of person who takes their time, and pays lots of attention to detail - almost too much as I have been told. It was impossible for me to make something like that in such a short space of time. So instead, I decided to make little features for a garment e.g. I had leaves and twigs that we had collected from yesterday, and Danielle suggested that I sew into them, and hang/attach them to a garment at a later date. Some of the leaves were still wet. I tried to dry them off as best as I could, but when I tried sewing into them, they ripped. This also happened with the ones that were too dry, so for this technique to work, the leaves had to be just right, and I didn't have the time or resources to make this happen. I kept on trying for a while with different leaves and different threads, and it wasn't really working, so I gave up. by this point, everyone had wandered off - again.
So, it was time to pack and set off.
The overall experience I would say was eye opening - it wasn't just about the work, but about the camping, the barn, eating outside, working outside, the pizza oven - these were all things that I hadn't experienced before and wasn't too sure about them - I loved it and would definitely do it again!
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