I’ve just spent the afternoon at the Greenwood Centre, Hampton with some delightful ladies – members of the Will and Way Club (a craft and social club for seniors). It’s all part of The Frame community art project I’ve been working on all year with Sue Edkins for the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames’ Arts Team, and we have now reached the workshop stage.

Two hours flew by chatting, eating some delicious home-made bread and jam brought by one of the members, and making motifs to form a border around the three images we’ll be making for Diamond Jubilee Gardens, inspired by Twickenham’s role in WW1.

With a pile of coloured collage sheets and some reference pictures for inspiration, the ladies went to work making all sorts of items, from vegetables representing the allotments dug in Richmond Park to help feed a hungry population, to one of the tobacco tins Queen Mary issued to every soldier at the Front. The star item for me was a tiny packet of Woodbines made by Grace, who remembered people talking about ‘Woodbine Willie’ the priest who offered cigarettes as well as comfort to dying soldiers during the war.

This week we’ve also been working with St Stephen’s Primary School making work for the project, but I’ll report on that in a separate post.

Once a week I run a one-hour art class for under 5s. It’s attended by a group from a local nursery, and there is no nicer sound than hearing the children laughing with excitement as they come along the corridor towards my room. It’s great fun to spend time with three-year-olds – they are such charming, funny and entertaining people. It’s lovely to dip into a world where the only problem is whether to play ‘Wheels on the Bus’ or ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’ at the end – this choice seems to be loaded with a great deal of emotional significance and has been known to cause tears.

I’ve filled a noticeboard in the room with past projects – they are usually collage-based and inspired by a different picture book each week, which I then read to the class. Can you spot work inspired by Petr Horacek, Jenni Desmond, Karin Littlewood, Leigh Hodginson, Ed Vere, Yasmeen Ismael, Neal Layton and Chris Haughton?

I make a lot of use of novelty hole punches from Blade Rubber, a shop just near the British Museum – they have a tremendous range to choose from, with leaves, stars and flowers being especially useful.

I’ve had another lovely afternoon with the “Recycled Teenagers” – the Over 55s group at National Trust property Sutton House in Hackney. We were making decoupage plates with a message, loosely inspired by the campaigning work of Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Doreen Lawrence). I invited everyone to think of a simple campaign slogan expressing something close to their heart, and create a suitable background with images from magazines. The results were fantastically varied and very inspiring.