Illuminated Letters in Edinburgh

Hello again! I’ve been overlooking my blog for too long, there were too many things to write about but never enough time.  So, no more postponing, I’ll just have to sit down and do it first chance I get.  I got my chance to help out at my first away workshop of the year on the 12th of February in Leith for an Illuminated Letters workshop. Strangely enough that was also the first Illuminated Letters workshop I’ve been to and am very proud to say that I grabbed the chance to contribute my own letter to the collection.

So I met Morag at Queen Street station on a cold, rainy and windy morning, with our bags and suitcase and we made our way to Edinburgh as we did so many other times and then to Leith Library were unfortunately the weather followed us. We met Sandra who showed us the room the workshop would take place in and I started unpacking all our materials, something which took a bit longer than it should since I had to play with all of them first, and luckily I managed to finish before anyone else arrived!

When the rest of the ladies arrived, Morag started with a small quiz, hoping to demonstrate the reasons why remembering and celebrating women’s achievements is so important and necessary. It succeeded as it did so many other times. Because there are only two named female statues in Edinburgh and three in Glasgow and women in Switzerland didn’t vote until 1971 and somehow these things just don’t look good enough, do they?

And after that the real fun started, we took our cards out with all the wonderful women and their stories, and everyone enjoyed discovering all those extraordinary things that women throughout history did in their lives or remembering the ones who shaped their own lives and then we got to work.

Some chose a woman from our list, others chose a woman from their life and we wrote our letters in coloured paper, with many different coloured pens, we put glitter and gems on them, cut their corners in shapes of butterflies, stuck flowers on them, while talking about and discovering even more women.

By the time we finished my hands had every colour of the rainbow on them, we had four more letters for our collection, I had discovered quite a few more amazing women that I didn’t know and I had spent the last two hours colouring and glittering in the company of four beautiful and very interesting women. All in all not bad at all for a day’s work!