The Red Door: Paper Crafting Poppies

Monday 11 August 2014

Paper Crafting Poppies

We had such a super evening paper-crafting Poppies with Kirsty Baynham at The National Museum of Scotland on Friday that we want to share a few snaps of the evening with you. Above you can see our welcome table where Red Door Gallery-ettes Nicky & Claire and Illustrator Kirsty herself welcomed a lovely audience to our workshop.

We had a small, curated exhibition of Kirsty’s print works, which showcases her style and interest in combining the organic shapes of the animal kingdom with contrasting, geometric shapes to produce glorious pattern based art works.

For this “After Hours” event, the Museum had invited The Red Door Gallery team to produce a workshop, taking inspiration from their “Common Cause” exhibition. The strong visual connection of the “many hands” shown above is reminiscent of the exhibition title.And of course, is reminiscent of the many hands of a crafter’s circle! The main shape of the crafting project was circlar too – in the form of a geometric poppy. A WW1 symbol of remembrance, the poppy was adopted by illustrator Kirsty Baynham as her central motif. Each leaf of the poppy has a different “War Animal” illustrated upon it, including the horse, a dog, some ponies and a carrier pigeon. Each leaf detaches from the centre of the poppy, and is actually a tiny envelope. Each petal in ruled on the reverse to form a tiny notelet to share with friends and family as a keepsake. The hand doubles as a hanging device which can be kept and displayed once all the letters have been sent.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined in the workshop, please do send us some photos of your final pieces as you choose to display them. Thanks also to Kirsty for her remarkable design work, and to The Museum for inviting to join in such a fantastic event.