November 2023

This year as Yr 2 students we were responsible for the marketing, putting up, pulling down and rota for manning the pop up shop. Also making sure any monies from sales were given to the relevant students at the end of the year.

The theme this year is “Light” and we have to create two or three 10″x8″ pieces of that relate to our current practice/materials. Already got a stumbling block because I’m really not sure what mine is at this stage.

The venue this is was “We are Super” in the Sovereign Centre in Weston. As soon as the rota came out I put myself down for the only day I knew I was able to do due to work and family commitments. I also helped set up the display, and checked the monies at the end of the week.

So, I guess me being me I went a little of tangent in that I decided to screen print cotton tote bags. Re-useable bags are always handy and they can be folded down to fit the required measurements. I also had a couple of prints of the slogan on paper. However, I did sell a bag so I consider that a positive result.

A couple of ideas of how to do the designs for the bags, using a quote by Maya Angelou “Be a rainbow in someoneelse’s cloud” I then chose the colours and learnt how to mix them up with the medium for fabric printing.

Did some test prints of the designs on cotton fabric scraps. Decided which one I liked best and then set up the production line to print out 10 bags.

I then used the same screen to print out onto paper, the writing didn’t really stand out the same on paper so I decided to line up and go over the words in black.

The problem we had sorting out the money is that we didn’t really set a spreadsheet up to record the sales properly, and some of the students got paid privately for work. Coming from an accountancy background it would have been really easy for me to set some simple tracker up that could have been printed out. Being totally transparent, I didn’t want to do that. Just because I could and I have the financial knowledge. It really didn’t take very long to reconcile the records we had.

I also think, that as there were lots of gaps on the rota because the 1st years wanted to do their spot with their friends, we should have given clearer guidines on it only being one person at the quiet times, and if you insist on it being two of you then you do two shifts. One of the 2nd year students did more than their fair share of covering shifts that people couldn’t.