chYps, Siblings and Canvases

I am a children's nurse specialist and work for chYps (Children and Young People's Service) We are a hospice at home service for the London Borough of Bexley and West Kent. We are part of the EllenorLions Hospices. We are currently expanding our service further into West Kent.

We were recently granted some Department of Health funding to set up some Sibling weekends, to support and acknowledge what bereaved siblings and siblings of children with life limiting and life threatening conditions go through. Together with Glynis our Play Therapist, and Tracie our Lead Nurse I have been involved in setting up a weekend of activities for these children from 5 to 18 years.  Hopefully these weekends will become a regular feature for our organisation.

This coming weekend Linda and I are running craft workshops at this event and have decided to make memory canvases with the children.  They have been asked to bring along a photo or two of their sibling.  We have been shopping for lots of materials and have raided our own stash too. Lots more memory work has been arranged too.

This weekend I made a few samples for the children to see. I have tried to keep it simple due to time and age range.  We plan to take the Cricut along so they can  cut a character and a name each.

For these three canvases used scraps of Basic Grey Boxer, Archaic and Blush. The Storybook Cartridge was used for the lettering. The Create a Critter Cartridge was used for the dinosaur, the Paisley Cartridge for the owl and toadstool and the Princess Cartridge for the Princess! For the purpose of these samples I used photos of my great nephew and nieces.

I think we will have fun making these next weekend and with the young people's permission hope to share some of the craft work.

We are planning to keep these workshops going on a regular basis. If anyone feels they would like to donate some craft materials to this project please contact me at this email address. Many thanks.