So… this is what’s been keeping me busy for the last month, and more flat-out the last 4 days.

My friend Athina and I decided that rather than just combine our skills, talents, experience and energy to do smaller creative workshops as we’ve done in the past, we would do a HUGE event/workshop combination to end all event/workshop combinations!

Ok, so, the idea began as a desire to meet other creatives on Paros, to inspire and share our skills and to raise funds for charity.

Rather than set up a lot of individual workshops we decided to combine a show/fair and mini workshops into 2 days over a weekend. All for FREE.

We invited creatives from different genres to join us and set up in a beautiful space owned by the municipality. The plan was simple – 6-7pm meet and greet the artists and check out their work. 7-9pm FREE mini workshops. Buy/donate money to charity.

We were lucky enough to obtain support from many small businesses on the island in order to arrange everything and the weekend was a huge success. Everyone had fun, people learned new things and we even raised money for our chosen charities.

Athina has been doing work with people with disabilities her whole life so her chosen charity was the Cycladic association for the blind, AROGI.

I chose to support PAWS, the Paros Animal Welfare Society, cause, you know… me and animals!

We had people who did collage, decoupage, soaps and lotions, jewelry, weaving, watercolour, mixed media, macrame, rock painting, fimo sculpture, mandalas and cookie decorating.

Here are some photos of the event!

We also had a demonstration of tap dancing and tango from people who teach on the island.

As always, Vincent was there to spread the joy…

The president of AROGI gave a short talk and shared what their association does for people with sight issues on the islands and brought in some items to give people a taste of what its like to not be able to see.

And of course we had information about PAWS and donation tins.

All in all, it was a fun weekend and a great success. We will be organising more stuff in the future, but of course, like life in any tourist destination… as summer approaches everyone becomes too busy to do anything other than work. So autumn is when we plan to start up again!

Till then I need to find a way to advertise and book my own sculpture and art workshops for visitors on the island – now that Air BnB is no longer supporting new ‘adventures’…

I will put out flyers in hotels and such, but that means people can only book on short notice (as they aren’t often here for long) and I’m often flat out grooming in summer. I need to have advance notice to organise workshops.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to get the word out and book small private workshops online, please let me know.

z