What Happens When You Give a Team Two Hours and Some Tissue Paper

At the start of this year, I ran a workshop for the team at Taunton Brewhouse. Christmas had just finished — that particular kind of exhaustion that comes after weeks of being switched on for everyone else — and they wanted something quiet and restorative. A chance to come back together before the new year properly began.

We made botanical paper lanterns. Delicate tissue paper, dried flowers and leaves, each one pressed and layered by hand. It's the kind of making that asks just enough of you to pull your attention gently away from everything else, without demanding anything you don't have. Nobody needed any experience, nobody needed to be good at art, they just needed to show up.

What I noticed, as the room settled into the work, was how quickly people relaxed into it. Conversation loosened. There's something about having your hands occupied that makes it easier to just be with people, without the pressure of performing or producing. By the end of the session, the table was full of finished lanterns — each one slightly different, each one held up with something that looked a lot like pride.  We’d also managed to plan a new team meeting ice breaker and planned to start playing Traitors each week, but more on that in another post.

We finished with pizza. It sounds like a small thing, but sharing food after making something together has a way of cementing the afternoon. People left having created something they hadn't expected to make, and having connected with their colleagues in a way that a meeting room rarely allows.

It felt like the right thing for January — bringing a little light into the darker months, quite literally.

That session was one I led myself, but it's only one small example of what's possible. The thing that makes what I offer genuinely different isn't just that I run creative workshops. It's that I have something I've spent years building: a network of professional artists and makers across Somerset, all of them experienced teachers, all of them brilliant at what they do.

Willow weaving. Printmaking. Textiles. Calligraphy. Rag rug making. Needle felt. Paper quilling. Origami. Floristry. Embroidery. Paper crafts. These are just some of the skills sitting within my contact list — a list that, as far as I know, nobody else in Somerset has spent the time to build in quite this way.

When a company comes to me about a wellbeing workshop, my job is to listen to what the team actually needs, and then match them with exactly the right person to deliver it. I'll be there on the day too — to welcome people, keep things running smoothly, and make sure the experience feels looked after from start to finish. You don't have to find a facilitator, vet them, brief them, or manage the logistics. That's all mine to handle.

If you're thinking about something for your team; a one-off wellbeing afternoon, a seasonal event, an away day with something a little different at its heart, I'd love to talk it through with you. Get in touch at thearthopper@outlook.com