Historyworks joined up with community organizations for the Pumpkin Festival on Wednesday 25th October at the Barnwell Community Centre on Newmarket Road.  Abbey People hosted the event in partnership with ChYpPS, Historyworks and Cambridge Sustainable Food for a celebration of all things Autumnal. 

We spent weeks ordering up some fun materials for making puppes that would be make up owls and bats, pumpkins and apples for the children to make because we provided table-top arts and crafts!  

The event started at 2pm with the pumpkin cooking lessons freely provided by local chef Sam Dyer with her colleagues at Sustainable Cambridge, which meant that there was very tasty soup for everyone!

For the table-top arts and crafts activities, Historyworks chose making moveable puppets and stick puppets!  For younger children, we had stick puppets of flying Pterosaurs which they beautifully coloured, and we could tell them the stories of Coldham's Common in Juraissic times when flying lizards soared over this area of Cambridge.

You can see a Pterosaur puppet here:

The moveable puppets were suitable for the older primary children and young adults helped too, because they required a lot of concentration so took children a good 30 minutes to complete.  The choices were an owl, or a pumpkin, an apple, a bat, or a ghostie.  They could have up to 5 moveable parts, and for the bat, a string system, for the wings to go up and down!   We had over one hundred puppets made, and some children stayed at our craft station for over an hour, making more than one puppet.  The favourite puppet to make this year was the owl and the bat, and here are a few examples.

Edd from ChYpPS on the bat table:

Historyworks volunteers holding up their owls:

Children proudly holding up their owls:

ChyYpPS were also running a brilliant camp fire activity once it was getting dark with children toasting marshmallows, and Claire from ChYpPS lit the fire and kept everyone safe again!  Hooray!!

Everyone had a fantastic time and a huge thanks due to Jade-Anne and Ania because it was a really happy community event and fantastic to be outside together in the Autumn!

Here is our slideshow of photos from the event, but we don't have pictures of the other activities, so if any one in Abbey had some they can contribute, please email to us!