Knowsley Vinvolved Awards 2011

Last week, Me, Cousi, Carole and Anna were invited to attend the Knowlsey Vinvolved Awards 2011. There was a superhero theme on the night and we where invited to attend in fancy dress or formal wear. I went for formal wear. Although some volunteers did attend in fancy dress, there was even a giant kangaroo (i think) and scooby doo. I had been told in advance by Carole who I volunteer with that I had won an award, she very kindly nominated me, but I was unsure as to how I would recieve it and what it would be. Anna, Cousi and Me were also going to recieve a certificate to recognise the hours we have given whilst volunteering.

Cousi and Me being escorted down the red carpet on arrival by a Superhero!

The night was presented by a group of young volunteers, in fancy dress of course and they did a wonderful job. It was really nice to know even the running of the event had volunteers involved. As an active volunteer within Knowlsey and Liverpool it was great to get to meet other young volunteers and here about all the other projects going on.

Since June 2010, I have been volunteering within Halewood Arts Association and National Museums Liverpool. I think I am on 400+ hours at the moment. Volunteering is something I love doing and I especially like giving something back to the community I have grew up in and to gain recognition for the work I have done at Halewood Arts Association was lovely.

Anna, Cousi and Me recieving our certificates from Jackie Davies, Chief Executive of Knowsley CVS

Awards were presented by Colin McKeown, TV/Film Maker and Producer of Independent Production Company LA Production and Jackie Davies (pictured above). The award ceremony was decorated very nicely, with each table themed under a different superhero. We were on 'The Incredibles' table and as an 'Event Designer' I spent a lot of my time looking at the table decorations and event styling. Which I really liked, huge cocktail glasses filled with different coloured lighting where on each table and there where cute bat decorations around. 

There was a caricaturist at the night too, giving free portraits to all attending and we were entertained by the brilliant Kirkby based dance group Performance Studios, local band Major Major and singer Jay Norton (who was really good!)

Carole, Project Manager of Halewood Arts getting a free Caricature 

The night was brilliant and it was lovely to receive an award. I was not expecting to get a real award at all and I also got £30 worth of vouchers which was lovely. Overall there was 9 of us who won Youth Volunteer of the Year and after hearing why we all received an award, every one was really deserved.

Cousi, Carole, Me. Halewood Arts Association.

7 of the 9 Youth Volunteers of the Year 2011

My lovely award

I am very grateful for my award and would like to thank Carole a lot for not only nominating me, but also giving me the opportunity to volunteer within Halewood Arts Association. I have learnt so much there and recieving some recognition for the work I have done there has been wonderful.

If this is the first time you have read my blog, feel free to browse my portfolio on my website.

Thank you to KCVS  for the photographs. You can read the official press release from KCVS for the awards here.

Always Forgetting

I am always blogging and then ten minutes from posting realise I have forgotton something. Every time it happens! This week I forgot to blog about being featured on The Young Creatives blog. It is a fairly new project, but it is a really great way of discovering new, up and coming under 25s within the creative industry. My hits on my website and followers on twitter have gone up since being on there and I would definitely recommend browsing through the website to see if any of the other 'young creatives' stand out to you. Some great work is being feautured on there. You can read my interview here. If you use twitter you can follow The Young Creatives here @t_yc.

I am still working in the Museum at the moment, just coming towards the end of the project I have been working on and looking forward to starting the next. I am going to write a full blog post about the exhibition I have been working on when I finish. I printed out my final plans today and there is a meeting tomorrow to discuss them. So as you can imagine I am pretty nervous! This suddenly feels a lot scarier than having tutorials with Paul in Uni!

Just a few examples of what I have been doing at the museum

Now on a different yet extremely exciting note, I am very happy to announce that in May I am going to be reunited with the wonderful Kate of @gowercottage. Kate asked me to work alongside her at the Real Food Festival at Earls Court in May and of course I said yes, not only because I will get to eat some of her amazing Gower Cottage Brownies, but I get to wear one of the much wanted BITE ME t shirts! I can tell already its going to be so much fun and I literally cannot wait for our reunion. Fingers crossed it can beat PIEGATE 2010. How many days is it till May?!

Piegate 2010 <3

Finally...

I am now 100% officially, Sophie Bold, BA Hons Theatre, Performance and Event Design (first class)

January Update

It's coming to the end of January now and as I have had a little spare time, I thought I would use today to update all the things I have been meaning to update for a while. My blog being one of them. If you follow me on twitter, or read my blog at all, then you will know at the beginning of January I started a four week internship at National Museums Liverpool in the design department. I have been enjoying it so much and learning such a lot about Auto CAD and the work that goes into designing an exhibition. 

At the moment I have been lucky enough to work on the Living Apart by Ian Berry exhibition. As it is a photography exhibition I have been trying to work out the layout of the moveable walls and the photographs. Its been a great starting project as it has allowed me to get really stuck into learning AutoCAD. Luckily I know the exhibition space pretty well, as it is the space the museum kindly allowed me to use as the location for my final major project at University. It is great to be able to learn how a real exhibition comes together and see how the designers work alongside a large number of other departments and people to make an exhibition come together. After a meeting this week, where I shown the plans I had come up with (very nerve-racking) I was asked if I would like to extend my internship until the beginning of March. I am so happy to be able to stay longer as I feel I am learning so much another four weeks would be brilliant.

Things are definitely looking up for me at the moment, I have been getting really stuck into Halewood Arts Association and I am currently in the process of planning and organising a really exciting project for the Junior Artists Club. It will run over a few weeks and involve the local community and Halewood Park. Fingers crossed the children enjoy it, I will blog more about it when the details become more finalised. Me and Carole are also in the process of applying for lots of funding, so if you are reading and would like to give Halewood Arts Association some money, feel free.

There is a lot to look forward too over the next couple of weeks. I will be graduating (finally) on the 8th February and can't wait, even if I am very nervous about standing up on stage.

I have finished updating my website too and feel happy with how it looks now. If you would like to have a look through that would be great and feel free to give me any feedback... but please be nice.

Museums, Events and Meetings

It has only just occurred to me that I haven’t blogged in 2011. I have been pretty busy lately and keep saying to myself, I will blog tonight and then completely forgetting. So here it is!

I have been up to quite a bit in the first 12 days of the year. Firstly I have been back at Halewood Arts Association. Me and Carole have been trying to work out the years events and what we would like to do within Halewood Arts. One of the first things we are thinking about is getting Halewood Arts online. I have been put in charge of the twitter account. Ever since the Good Food Show in Birmingham, I have become completely addicted to twitter. Not only are all the people on their lovely, supportive and always on hand with advice, it is a really great way of networking and meeting people with similar interests and careers. It seemed the obvious thing to do to get Halewood Arts Association on there. If you are on twitter it would be great if you could follow us. I am trying to get our followers up at the moment.

@halewoodarts

Carole has asked me to take lead with some of the childrens art workshops too, which is great. I am just trying to come up with some exciting things they can do. A lot of the children have been attending for a number of years and it can be hard to think of new things for them to do each week.

I am also having a large input in the events going on with Halewood Arts Association this year and assisting Carole with applying for funding and thinking of interesting things we can do within the community and with the children. I shall keep you posted on anything we come up with.

On Monday I started my internship / work experience within the Liverpool Museum Design department. I have only been there two days but I am loving it already. The design team mostly work with Auto CAD, a program I haven’t used before. Simon, one of the lead 3D designers talked through the program with me for about an hour and I seem to have picked up the basics now. On my first day I recreated some plans they have and managed to get them as close as I could. I am working on a real project now, working on wall plans and photo layout. I am really enjoying it and look forward to the next four weeks. If I come away from this with a new skill of being able to use Auto CAD it will be brilliant.

I also had a great meeting with Rich Pontefract from Another Media based in Liverpool. I got in touch with him to ask for some advice about getting ahead in the Event Management industry and he kindly offered to meet with me to discuss it in person. It was one of the most informative hours I’ve ever had. He gave me pages and pages of advice and also explained to me how he set up his business and what he has done since University. It was extremely helpful and it was nice to have someone reassure me that everything I am doing at the moment is good. Sometimes you need someone who isn’t a parent or friend to tell you that you are doing well. I came away from the meeting very positive and look forward to meeting Rich again in the future.

This weekend I am hoping to go to the Liverpool Wedding Show with my cousin who is due to marry in 2012, should be a great way of meeting people within the event industry also.

2010... Its been a pleasure, but bring on 2011

As so many people seem to be doing the same and to also make myself realise how busy this year has been I am going to blog about 2010. The more I think about it the more I realise just how busy this last year has been and I feel very proud about everything I have achieved.

January feels like a million years away and I'm glad I have my blog archive to help remind me what actually happened. It was January that I began my Major Personal Project for my Theatre, Performance and Event design degree. It is so interesting to look back on my old blog posts and see how my original idea didn’t change as much as I thought it would. My aim was to create an exhibition that shown another side to Liverpool, my home town and that is what I achieved.

February – April consisted of planning and organising my 21^st and lots and lots and lots and lots of research and designing for my Major Personal Project.

I was also lucky enough to be involved in the St Marys Hospice Charity Window Dressing Event in Birmingham. With my team coming in second place. This is where my passion for volunteering came about and I really enjoyed it. Click here for more info about this event.

I also had work experience within World Liverpool Museum which was a great experience. They even let me design and paint a mural on a wall within one of the temporary exhibitions. To see more of this click here. It was also in April that I really started to become confident in Sketchup and my love hate relationship with the programme began.

May had to be one of the hardest, most stressful, yet rewarding months of my life. It was this month that I was in University from 7 in the morning, until we got kicked out and working until 3/4/5 in the morning every single day. My life revolved around making scale bricks, pavements, white cards models and praying my huge sketchup model wouldn’t crash.

It was June that I could finally say I HAVE A DEGREE. It was the most amazing feeling in the world handing all of my work in and seeing it all displayed in our amazing degree show. One of the amazing things about being on a course with only 15 other people is 1, how unbelievably close you all become and 2, how quickly you get your results. Within 2 weeks of handing in my work and also being chosen to be marked by the external examiner, I got given my results. I will never forget the moment Paul told me I got a first. University was the best experience I have ever gone through and when I look back at how hard I worked, I feel so proud at my results and don’t regret anything from University.

My exhibition shows the journey an emigrant would go on during the 19th Century and the problems they would face along the way. As I also enjoy theatre design, I wanted to combine a sense of theatre within my exhibition and wanted the exhibition to become an experience. Allowing the visitor to feel as if they had stepped back in time and actually become an 19th Century emigrant. I chose to do this by creating a fully dressed space using actors in each area to interact with the visitors and make the whole concept feel real. To see my final major project click here.

July – Present ;

Since leaving University I have been lucky enough to get involved in a lot. Volunteering is something I am passionate about and I have been able to get stuck into a lot of this. Since June I have been Volunteer Event and Exhibition Co-Ordinator for Halewood Arts Association. This has been an excellent opportunity for me and I have learnt so much from Carole who runs all of HAA. I assist with the organising of trips, events and exhibitions, aswell as assist in the weekly Junior Artists Club art classes. This is with a group of 7-12 year olds who all love art and it is so rewarding volunteering there. They even let me design the Christmas Grotto for the children, which is something I enjoyed so much! Carole has introduced me to so many lovely artists and volunteers and I cannot wait to get more involved in the next year. To see more of what I have done with HAA look at the Big Draw and Grotto tab to the left of my website. Or browse through my blog.

2010 has reconfirmed my love for working within the Event and Exhibition industry and after spending a week working at The BBC Good Food Show, Borough Market and the Real Food Festival, I have been lucky enough to combine work with my passion for food and cooking. This also allowed me to meet some lovely producers and people who now have the pleasure of putting up with me on twitter :)

I am really looking forward to what 2011 brings. I am to start a design internship in Liverpool Museum on the 10^th January which I can’t wait for and thanks to twitter have even managed to get some work on a huge wedding in May, assisting with an amazing wedding design company 'Sweet days and Roses' on making the wedding look beautiful.

If you are still reading thank you, I seem to have written more than I originally planned, but I forgot how much I have done. Hopefully 2011 will be a million times more busy and this time next year I hope to be writing about living in London, with a great job doing what I love.

I know everyone says it but 2011 is really going to be my year!

Habits and Habitats - The Big Draw 2010

This blog post has been a long time coming. If you regularly read you will know that I volunteer at Halewood Arts Association each Wednesday and here I help to organise and plan events. All summer me and Carole planned a Big Draw event, funded by the Big Lottery Fund (THANK YOU) for the local Halewood area. It took place in October and I have been waiting for the photos Ian Edwards took (Karens husband, his are a lot better than mine and thank you for them!) before I updated here.

Me and Carole wanted to include the Junior Artists Club as much as possible in the process and asked them what they would like the theme to be. After Carole spoke with the children who attend, we decided to come up with the theme of habits and habitats for the event. This also allowed us to take full advantage of the environment centre and the Halewood Triangle.

In the run up to the event we arranged a number of workshops for the Junior Artists Club, all around the theme and with the help of some local artists, Anthony Smith, Karen Edwards and Becky Bryson created artwork to be displayed within our event.

On the day we where a little worried at first, as the weather was awful. The night before had been torrential rain and as a majority of our event was outdoors, it made us worry that people would be put off. We couldn't have been more wrong. Over 200 people came to our event and took part in everything.

There was so much to get involved in. Indoors Anthony drew out a huge mural, showing the journey bees go on when they go out looking for honey. The visitors where invited to help fill in the mural and take part in a huge collaborative piece. It was great to see people aged 5 standing beside people aged 80 all getting involved in the same image. With a great final outcome.

One of our main aims with the event was to get local people to use Halewood Park and Triangle more. It is an underused resource and we wanted to include it as much as possible within our event. There was lots to do outside and using artwork the children had made in previous sessions, we decorated the park area to draw more people in.

As we wanted to ensure as many people where involved in the event as possible, The Halewood Walkers Group also got involved. They assisted Karen Edwards in making honeycomb to adorn the park area. This was a great idea and everyone loved exploring the park and breaking open the honeycomb to discover what was inside.

Outside there was so much to get involved in. Becky Bryson from the Liverpool Lantern Company was helping the visitors to make 2D fish. This was very popular as the visitors loved being able to make something and then take it away with them. With some visitors returning a few times, to make a Mummy, Daddy and Baby fish.

Barry Worrall was also there to assist visitors with drawing and collage. We wanted the visitors to take in their surroundings and create some images of the area we where in. This was really successful and the final images we got where so successful they are now showing in an exhibition in Halewood.

To keep with the theme of bees, Karen Edwards (the lovely artist who gave us a tour of The Bridewell... see previous blog post) came up with a 3D beehive that everybody could get involved with. The visitors where asked to get involved and decorate the individual panels of the beehive. It was really enjoyable and we had people from 2 up to 85 getting involved. The pieces where then put together the week after in the Junior Artists Club.

Overall the day was a huge success! It was great being able to get involved in the whole process from start to finish. Working alongside Carole and all of the artists has taught me so much about how to plan events and being able to do something within the local community was great. The feedback forms for the day where great, and we got 100% positive feedback. I'm looking forward to the Big Draw 2011 next!

Huge post so thank you if you are still reading and thank you so much to Ian Edwards who provided amazing photos from the day, I was going to take some myself but got that into all the activities didn't get the chance.