The Butterfly Blog

Here is the butterfly I made as part of the Meadow House mosaic butterfly project.

Meadow House, based in Ealing, is a specialist palliative care service funded by the NHS.  Meadow House work hard to ensure a welcoming and nurturing environment for patients and their visitors. It offers 3 levels of service:  planned/review of care, symptom control and assessment and end of life care. There are 15 single rooms all with en suite facilities. There is a conservatory which is fully equipped to allow patient beds to be accommodated there if the patient would like to spend time out of their room.

My chum Anne and I have been going to a mosaic workshop with Kitty Hartnell along with several other people for a few years. We are all keen mosaic makers and the sessions with Kitty help us all improve our mosaic skills, encourage and inspire each other and have a good chat and catch up whilst working on our mosaics.

When Vicky Pearson (a volunteer at Meadow House) went to visit Anne, she saw the large mosaic butterfly that Anne had made. She commented that it would be lovely to have some butterflies as ‘room plaques’ for the 15 rooms at Meadow House.  Anne discussed this with Kitty and the idea was born to get the group to make the mosaic butterflies as room plaques as a voluntary project.

Vicky  and Nicky  Cockayne (Ward Manager) were delighted with this idea and gave a list of all the butterflies (including some moths) to Kitty, who then set about cutting them out of plywood and drawing them up ready for us all to mosaic. It was agreed that we would make the 15 butterflies outside of our normal mosaic sessions so 16 of us met as and when we could on various dates over a 6 week period. Some people made a whole butterfly, others mixed and matched. They key aim was to get them all mosaiced, grouted, painted and ready to hand over to Meadow House before Christmas. It was a great team effort and we all enjoyed it very much.

On Wednesday 3^rd December the butterflies were ready to fly away to Meadow House.  Nicky and Vicky arrived at Kitty’s to be greeted by the several of the mosaic team, a celebratory glass of fizz and a table full of beautiful, vibrant mosaic butterflies.

Nicky said the butterflies exceeded all her expectations and she was delighted with the results, which will definitely make the rooms at Meadow House more homely for the patients and their visitors.

A big thank you must go to Anne and Vicky who had the ‘chrysalis’ of the idea. Also thanks to the mosaic gang who gave their time so generously – it was often quite challenging for a creative group who are used to doing their own thing, to have to make the butterflies authentic and symmetrical – which Kitty insisted upon! However, the biggest thanks goes to Kitty who so keenly agreed to the idea, provided all the materials, cut and drew the shapes and steered and encouraged us all making sure we used vibrant, colourful materials therefore enabling the project to ‘hatch’ into these 15 beautiful mosaics butterflies.

COMING SOON:  a look back to the highlights of 2015.