Collecting the 100 smiles was a challenge. The women’s
personalities really came out. For example it became clear that Lovely Louise from
Bolsover had a keen interest in Tudor history from her list of 16th century
women. Some women wanted family members,
other figures from local history whilst others chose household names. We had writers, saints, comediennes, architects, explorers,
business women, politicians, royalty, suffragettes, theologians, sportswomen,
scientists and fictional characters.
What I found most interesting was that Olga and Basia thought the Polish women’s
group facilitator’s list of women were not appropriate. The facilitator hadn’t
attended any of the sessions and the list seemed to be TV celebrities or women
famous for being married to a politician rather than for their own
achievements. When asked who they wanted to see they produced a very
interesting list of Polish ‘heroes’ that I had never heard of and one very interesting
woman who I had. Now Bolsover and Shirebrook are former mining communities so
Margaret Thatcher is a divisive character; I certainly wasn’t going to suggest
her. However she was top their list of
strong inspirational women so I had to suppress my own personal opinions and
let her on to the banner.
So the women either sent me images directly or names and I
sourced images. Sometimes this was a
challenge as images weren’t of a definition that I could use so we had to find
other images or rescan them. I was
compiling a folder of the images and gradually over a number of weeks we
reached 100.
The smiles are arranged in alphabetical order of their first
name.
Now my plan had always been to use the commercial printer
that I had used on the first Bolsover project however Super Shirley from
Shirebrook had a son who ran a print business that specialised in print on
textiles for flags, banners and cushions and she arranged for him to print our
background fabric for our banner. With the
deadline so tight, Shirley bought us at least a couple of weeks by sorting a very short lead time on the printing with the statement ‘He’ll do as his Mum
says!’
The print was lovely and ready for our lettering which we
had been working on.
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