Mad Hatter's Tea Party

On Saturday we did something rather special... 

It was the 34th Worldwide SketchCrawl Day but, here in the UK, it was way too cold to work out on location, so we tried a new idea. At 10am, the Sheffield SketchCrawl team all brought their best crockery and silverware, plus a food contribution to our house. 

Pam raided the local antique centre, so we had very posh candelabras, some extraordinarily themed tea-pots and a very unusual, Russian tea-urn that looked not unlike a prototype diving bell: 

We had so much wonderful stuff, we were able to set up three tables around the house, all heaving with food and packed to capacity with suitably crazy props.

And since it was a Mad Hatter's tea party, we all wore hats (some of us had several hats to choose from and so changed throughout the day).

Once we were set up, we all sat round the tables and drew. I decided to stick to my Inktense watercolour pencils, which are great for very quick but very colourful work. 

There was so much going on, I didn't get around to doing a headcount, but there must have been 20 - 25 people in all. We were all concentrating so hard, it was surprisingly quiet most of the time.

Except every 15 - 20 minutes, when John stood in the hall and rang a bell, shouting 'All change! All change!' and (despite some sighs of despair) everyone moved round one seat, and began a new sketch. 

Every so often he, and our invaluable helper Wendy, served mugs of tea to everyone - quite a feat, since one table was upstairs in the converted spare bedroom and the third was set up in my studio, way up in the attic:

Rumours filtered down to those in the dining room that some of the sketchers at the upstairs tables had given into temptation and began nibbling, so we stopped for elevenses and all tucked into the goodies.

At lunchtime we were spoilt for choice. People wandered up and down between the rooms investigating all the different food on offer. Several sketchers had baked specially. The Davies family had made biscuits stamped with letters, laid out on a plate spelling SKETCHCRAWL, as illustrated here by the wonderful Andrea Joseph: 

Andrea had created jars of potted-eyeballs and allotment-antipasti, all beautifully packaged, with hand-drawn labels in her own inimitable style:

After lunch we swapped rooms, so we had different things to draw, but John was just as vigilant with his bell, so there was no time to get complacent!

You might remember me mentioning our very talented young member, Tom, who has come to almost every event since we started in 2009. Well it was great to welcome his younger brother Harry with us this time too: 

Joshua, aged only 9, was also taking part for the first time, and worked steadily all day, producing some lovely drawings: 

We drew until about 3.30, when people started to wilt. So we had more tea and squeezed in yet more cake (gorgeous brownies Tom and Harry...).

Then we took all our sketchbooks into the living room, spread them out on the carpet and - very excited to see what each other had done - dug in with relish! Here's just a sample:

Postscript: just been sent a photo of the biscuits, which were brought all the way from Hull - there's dedication!

If you want to see more of the work done, take a look at our Facebook group SketchCrawl North.