Stages In The Making...

This season's creative 'make & take home' workshops, tailored for children
and their families to compliment The Captain Cook Memorial Museum's
'Botanical Endeavours! Joseph Banks and Cook's First Voyage' 2019 Exhibition

Tues 23rd April  11am - 4pm 
'Flower Press Gang!'
Join the flower press gang. Build a wooden press and capture native flora
to take home ready for a future reveal. 
  
Weds 31st July  11am - 4pm 
'Kaleidoscope Magic'
Make your own mirrored viewing tunnel and observe a new rainbow world
of ever changing petal and seed patterns.

Weds 14th August  11am - 4pm 
'Flower Press Gang!' 
Another chance to join the flower press gang. Build a wooden press
and capture native flora to take home ready for a future reveal. 
 
Weds 30th October  11am - 4pm 
'Botanical Lanterns'
Layer die cut colourful papers and free form silhouette shapes to create
your own special illuminated glass jar landscape of exotic flowers and plants. 

This community collaboration was the brainchild project of the museum's own Miriam Shone. Squares ​individually finished in fabric and thread by local peoples and carefully matched up and sewn together into the farewell final. 

Rachael's been busy making these little beauties. Her new Story Pin Cushions are practical and decorative, lovingly hand-stitched art works with a Victorian feel. Working together tactile vintage fabric, little celluloid and metal  charms, and sequins. They have been finished off with pinned glass bead edging.
​Each is a completely unique, one-off piece. Available from Saturday 7th May (for a pocket pleasing £12) exclusively from 'Angela & Rosie', Scarborough...

Rachael is proud to declare that she made these.
Twin Cow Heads of wire, wool, leather coat panels, curtain pieces, halved bouncy balls, paint, sweat and tears. Like the 2 she made in 2011, only this time in reverse polarity. Latest album cover to feature her purpose built artwork - MUMMERS by mysterious trippy folk sample duo The FLK. (Photography by Steve Sharp.)
Orderable via - http://mumusic.bigcartel.com/

Similar giant creature headdress commissions welcome!
Orderable via - http://www.glittermothfactory.co.uk/contact.html

​Being presented with a love token at anytime warms the cockles of a human heart.
Sailors swapped sentimental personal, handcrafted gifts with their wives and sweethearts (sometimes both!), when pressed to set sail and take leave of their homes, or on celebration of their return - as a reward for those thinking of them and patiently waiting for such a vast amount of time. Loved ones took great comfort in holding onto the hope that their sailor man; father of their children, husband or boyfriend would soon be restored to them. A ‘Sailor’s Valentine’ was the tangible promise that they would do all they could to return,
providing the faith was kept strong and the fates were kind.
 
‘Sailor’s Valentines’ were shelly scene boxes of little compartments filled with arrangements of shells and beads, some studded with phrases such as ‘Remember Me’ and  ‘Forget-Me-Not', with a central focus, a ship or anchor, maybe the guiding points of a compass, even a little painted portrait. A keepsake those at home could gaze into, knowing that their man’s heart, despite being away at sea, was settled there, forever with them. 
 
Why not come along to The Captain Cook Memorial Museum this Valentine’s day, choose from an assortment of pearls, miniature ships, paper forget-me-not flowers, shells, beads and charms, and make a unique valentine (similar to those brought back by Sailors from their voyages on the South Seas) for that special someone in your life? For that extra personal touch, you could bring along your own sentimental trinkets and photos to set inside your ‘Sailor’s Valentine’ box!

Workshop suitable for children and adults

Hosted by Yours truly...​

A selection of resulting Love Tokens. More pictures and comments: 
The Captain Cook Memorial Museum Facebook 

Celebrating a total of 3 instruments painstakingly handmade by prestigious Lythe based Craftsman Johannes Secker, which Rachael has been honoured to paint the finishing detail for. The latest, an Italian Virginals, with her finely brushed nameplate and jack rail lettering, likewise for Johannes' fortepiano of 2011, modelled on an instrument by Johann Andreas Stein c.1784, just purchased by The Royal College of Music.

​
These follow her design and painting of the cut flowers, feathers, shells and insects on the tulip wood soundboard and gold on blue nameplate lettering of Johannes' C17th copy of the harpsichord after Ruckers. This explosion of revived life and colour lends itself to the sentiment of the inscription on the underside of the lid, proclaiming that while the wood from which it was made was alive, it was mute; but now dead, it sounds sweetly
​(as a harpsichord.) Such a woozingly pretty sound. Such a visual extravaganza. Like a neatly styled music box or a Fabergé egg, once opened it shows off its breathtaking delight, no longer concealed. This is Rachael's favourite piece and her proudest accomplishment in terms of freely designed contemporary painting, complimenting the ingenuity of the past. Learning something too, of the highly skilled, involved process Johannes goes through in order to build such beautiful pieces, Rachael found it quite awesome to be a collaborator at the final stage of the harpsichord's development. She did not copy the decorative design of any previous instrument, and let the shapes of the sections within the soundboard, influence the flow of natural forms, which she worked into the lightly shellacked wood with dilluted gouache pigments.

​Put yourself in Stubbs’ shoes (by dressing up in his wig, overalls and sitting at his easel), pretending that you are being commissioned by Captain Cook to paint a different creature indigenous to Australia. Listen carefully to what he and his men saw and sketch with watercolour pencils what you imagine this creature to look like. Brush water over the top of your work of art and watch your portrait come to life.
 
To mark the importance of each child’s creature portrait, their finished work of art was mounted in a gold frame with nameplate, at Captain Cook’s declaration of approval. A photograph of The Cassowary Bird / Duck-Billed Platypus was then revealed to accompany the description. The little Stubbs could then take their masterpieces home! ​