Weaving well-being into workshops.
This weaving activity is designed to connect creativity and mental well-being for an audience of school teachers. The event was held at the William Morris Gallery, organised by Sarah Vallois, Cultural Learning Schools’ Officer for the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum. I got to speak about our work in this context too, alongside Stacy Moore, Educational Psychologist, Waltham Forest Educational Psychology Service, and Mary Mycroft of the Waltham Forest Music Service.
I used the NHS framework, 5 steps to mental well-being to structure the activity and my talk, aiming to show how creative workshops can help across all 5 steps (and more).
5 steps to mental well-being
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Learn new skills.
Paper weaving is a familiar activity to this audience but making it quite fiddly it demands a certain amount of attention to master. We also pointed out that it may well be new to their young people. And that there’s a lot of scope for refreshing and reinventing activities.
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Be physically active.
Paper weaving isn’t remotely sporty but it’s all about working with your hands, understanding what the material can and can’t do, haptic feedback, and fine motor skills. It’s about being physically engaged and thinking through doing.
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Pay attention to the present moment (mindfulness).
This activity has a balance of accessibility and challenge and that point of balance can be decided on by the weaver, a denser, more complex pattern or image will require more focus. This is the recipe for moments of flow – a mental state that is all about being in the present.
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Connect with other people.
People worked in twos and threes with people they did not know well and were encouraged to talk as they weaved. It was very convivial!
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Give to others
At the end of the activity, I asked people to give their weaving to one of the people they had been working with, turning it into a memento of the event and cementing the new connection.
And below are a few slides from my talk, showing the links between our creative workshops and mental well-being.
“It was great working with Sam, he responded to the brief in an innovative and creative way. He completely understood what we were hoping to achieve and all the participants commented on how much they enjoyed the paper weaving activity. I would highly recommend Sam and hope we get the chance to work together again soon.”
— Sarah Vallois, Cultural Learning Schools’ Officer for the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum