Some of the boxes crafted by Friends. Photo: Morag Sinton.
Eye - 17 May 2019
From colourful creations to wriggling tadpoles
Colourful creations
The covers of the Friend inspired some colourful creations at the recent Southern Marches and Mid Wales Quaker Camp, held over the Easter weekend at Rookhow Meeting House in Cumbria.
Friends, whose ages spanned seven decades, carefully folded the origami boxes in the Bank Holiday sunshine.
Morag Sinton, of Abergavenny Meeting, told Eye: ‘The covers were a joy to use and we had a lot of fun selecting colours and designs that went together… Some Friends just made one, while others got a taste for it and were even using the offcuts to make tiny boxes.’
She explained: ‘The boxes are folded from a single square of paper… They hold together perfectly well without glue, so can easily be recycled when finished with. Jan, who brought the front covers of the Friend with her and taught us how to make the boxes, had learned how to do them during a break on a Woodbrooke calligraphy course some years ago. With two squares of paper, one slightly smaller than the other, you create an inner box which fits snugly inside a box lid. You could go for a Russian doll effect, fitting ever smaller boxes inside each other.’
And the boxes weren’t purely decorative: ‘Over the weekend we had “secret friends”, and lots of people received a box or two. These contained all manner of things, including tangerines, daisy chains, small chocolate eggs, treasure maps, pebbles, flowers and poems.’
Wriggling tadpoles and wild garlic in the woods
When a local primary school was used as a polling station on 2 May, staff at Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria welcomed a class of Year 5 children to explore history and the natural world.
Ruth McCarthy, a Friend in Residence at the Hall, told Eye that: ‘They spent the morning with their teachers exploring all that the Hall grounds have to offer, including running through the glade, walking the labyrinth, looking at the beehives at the far end of the meadow and then trekking down the footpath to Swarthmoor Hall Wood, full of bluebells and wild garlic at this time of year.’
During lunch she chatted with several children ‘as they squatted by the pond in the vegetable garden watching hundreds of tadpoles wriggling’.
She described how ‘one aspires to be a zoologist and told [me]what creatures he had spotted under stones in the beck that flows through the wood… the peaceful Hall grounds offer a wide variety of habitats and teem with wildlife, from insects and small mammals, to owls, nesting swallows and many other bird species, a joy to observe at this time of environmental crisis.’
A lively tour of the Hall by local Friend Gill Lowden followed, ‘ending with a chance to dress up in the recently expanded collection of replica seventeenth century costumes. A demonstration of “hat honour” was enacted and there was opportunity for questions about Quakers’.
