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It started at the beginning of January with the idea that we could use some junk, that we would ordinarily throw out, to create something new and beautiful. It was also to encourage people to step outside, to discover what treasures they could find in the great outdoors; reduce household waste and shrink your Christmas waist! The other thing we were planning on was doing a poll on Facebook to see which product we made was everybody’s favourite and we would make that for the shop but this didn’t work for a number of reasons. Most importantly because everything we made was awesome and fun to make so we will carry on making all of them anyway (hence why it's mid-March and this blog is being published now!). Another, less positive, reason is nobody engaged with the posts and shared what they had done using the hashtags #junkuary and #tttp. Is this because it wasn’t something that was interesting? Is it too much effort? Or did you come across some similar obstacles to us? January is wet! It is cold and most people can be very grumpy! We also relied too much on beach-combing which wasn’t always accessible - too windy and the tide was often too high. We also had to spend a little bit of money to buy some equipment needed to up-cycle. However, this isn’t essential as there are so many projects you can work on with stuff lying around the house. Most of them are one off expenses too, which means we will keep on using them and as the weather continues (let's pretend it didn't snow last week) to improve beach-combing will become more regualr and more enjoyable! Junkuary has taught us a lot. We live in such a wasteful society. If something slightly breaks or we get bored of it, it gets thrown away. As a society, we don’t often look at something and think about how we could fix it or change it to make it more interesting again. This is what we have done and we will absolutely be continuing. Throughout Junkuary we made: 4 aprons (old bed sheets, curtains and clothes) 1 cushion (Old pillow case and jumpers) 9 bottle top junk brooches (bottle tops, resin, beads, nuts and bolts) 5 Sea glass brooches (sea glass/ ceramic and metal brooch back) 45 sea glass earrings (sea glass/ ceramic and silver plated stud earrings) 1 Hugo’s jazzy chair (A chair and some old clothes, scarfs and ribbon) 16 Wood burnt signs ( Pallet wood and a wood burning tool) 8 hand stitched TTTP bags (TTTP Bags and some thread) We went on walks to Teignmouth beach a few times and Mamhead Obelisk to find the things we needed. We would also like to say thank you to everyone that has given us stuff along the way. Right... now lets made 300 more bags... ;-) Where can you buy the things we have made? On our Etsy shop of course! www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TurningTidesProject Written by Abi Innocent, Published by Dom Palfreman What is the Turning Tides Support Network (TTSN)? THIS IS! As parents/carers, we want to create a support network at Turning Tides to accommodate our needs: What respite do we want? How can we make this happen? What do we want to do to give us a break? As a start, we decided to change the TTSN monthly meetings into a different format and this was our first result! We shared a home sewing day with lunch and lots of chat (some of the things we create will be available for purchase in our online shop) . We also learnt new skills from each other, such as:
We decided to make this a quarterly event and will ‘go with the flow!’ Would YOU like to join us too? Come for the whole day, or just pop in for an hour or so. Let us know if you have any ideas. Do you have a skill you could bring to our group? Even if you don’t, we’d love to see you at the next meet up. The next meeting is always written on the TTSN website page! Last of all, we now have a ‘social space’ on Facebook so the conversations can continue outside of our meetings! The group is a closed group and we respect each other’s privacy 😊 Written by Wendy Nicholls, Published by Dom Palfreman  |
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