FabLearn Conference at UCLan

This Sunday just passed (June 19th if you are reading from the future!) I was lucky enough to be able to help host two workshops, 'From Pen to Pixel to Plastic and Silk', as part of this year's FabLearn Conference (which you can read more about here!). 

The wonderful Bev Bush also hosted it, along with some great help from Charley Matthews and Chloe-Leigh Stott, so thank you! <3 Below are some pictures taken during the conference, which I'll talk through as we go along.

So we started off with a small demonstration from myself on how to use friendly plastic (which if you aren't familiar with are tiny plastic beads that 'melt' and become moldable in hot water). Nice and simple! Now onto the fun part...

Each person taking part in the workshops then made their own creatures out of the friendly plastic. It was so nice to see just how different and unique all of the creations were - not one person came up with the same thing! 

With characters created, they then moved onto Bev's part of the workshop - making an actual board for these characters to play on! So everyone designed their own board...

And here's when the magic comes in. Once the boards were done, Bev then took them over to her printer (of the magic variety, of course) and printed them onto silk. So now everyone had their own character(s) and a lovely board to play them on which can then be tied up with a string and taken anywhere. How cool is that? 

Here are some photos of the finished 'packages':

I had SO much fun helping out with the workshop and I cannot thank Bev enough for the opportunity (thank you again if you're reading this, Bev!). It was so nice to meet so many creative people from all over the world and to get to hear about all of the great things that they do. 

Bev also wrote a blog post about the event which you can read here if you're interested!