Mrs Smith’s Cottage

Thank you!

Thanks to all those who attended our Cottage Garden Fete on the 4th and 5th September – we had a fantastic weekend filled with music, dancing and traditional family games, and the sun kept shining!

Another big thank you to all those who came along to our Macmillan Coffee Afternoon – we were delighted to hold the event again!

An update from Nicki, our Artist-in-Residence

Hundreds of people turned out for Cliff Carnival’s FlagFest event at The Venue on Saturday 11 September. The event was the culmination of a joint project between Mrs Smith’s Cottage resident artist Nicki Jarvis and Katie Gordon, director of Cliff Carnival. Inspired by the concept of ‘Giving Thanks’ for the kindness of others during Covid, eight festival flags had been created by local volunteers. The imagery and text for the flags was developed at a workshop in August and the flags really added to the atmosphere of community fun and creativity while people enjoyed a variety of music and performance events as well as stalls and refreshments. The flags will now be available for Cliff Parishes to borrow, to enhance local community events and we look forward to hosting them at Mrs Smith’s Cottage in the near future.

Developing the Datestones

The last few carved ceramic tiles are currently being glazed and fired by Nicki, before being transformed into a community artwork for Navenby. Thank you to everyone who took part in the clay workshops, all the work looks amazing. Nicki’s next step for this project will be to explore the best places for the series of 15 site-specific carved datestones that she aims to install across Navenby by early next year. We will be discussing the proposed locations with local house and business owners to ensure they are happy with the proposals, as well as posting a project outline on the Mrs Smith’s Cottage website so everyone can find out more about these plans.

Upcoming Events in October

There’s lots to look forward to at Mrs Smith’s Cottage in October:

Friday 15th October will be the second session of our pre-school group, NavenBEES – join the NavenBEES group on Facebook!

We have some fantastic workshops lined up for October half term – on Tuesday 26th October artist Nadya Monfrinoli will be teaching techniques such as lino cutting and stamp making in her Block Printing workshop, between 10am and 1pm. It’s great fun for all of the family, and all materials are provided!

Nadya will be returning on Wednesday 27th October for a Book Making workshop – explore different paper folding and simple book binding techniques! If you attended the Block Printing workshop, you can use this paper you created, or use blank paper to be filled in at home.