Crafternoon

Crafternoon is our longest-running community project and our popular weekly after-school family arts club. 

It is an opportunity for children, parents and carers to come together and work on an exciting craft together every single week. Participants have not only had the opportunity to spend time together outside of school – completely free of charge – but Crafternoon also serves as a warm community space where all feel welcome.

Many of these families do not have sufficient access to arts resources, even at school, and so Crafternoon functions as a space for them to express their creativity in a positive setting without any financial burden. This is funded by trusts, foundations, and generous donors like you!

Last term, the theme was ‘colour’, with a different colour chosen each week by our ‘Crafternoon Spinning Colour Wheel’. Across the term, crafts included an orange sunset, green frog puppets, blue rock pools, as well as a lilac octopus – all of which were suggested by our Crafternooners.

The programme is consistently oversubscribed and so we are looking to expand this with a new weekly workshop for older children too – Craft Collective. This is another weekly after school club, but is a place where older children aged 8 – 12 can work collaboratively as a group, away from their adults and on more complex arts projects. 

Often as local children grow older, some leave Crafternoon due to a feeling that the club is no longer for them as they have moved into their final years of primary school or even into secondary school. Craft Collective is core to the continuation of relationships with our local community.