• Making the Peña backdrop
    There are lots of good things about the Pena venue – it’s spacious, the people who run it are friendly, and drinks are at club prices! To make us feel even more at home there we decided to make a backdrop for the stage.

    Steve from the Peña committee bought yards upon yards of heavy duty black fabric, which I made into a simple curtain which hangs over a pole and covers the tinsel. That was step one. But then we needed to make it our own – and I offered to make a banner of the Pena logo.

    I started by enlarging the figure in the logo – not easy as I only have an A4 printer and this took quite a while with paint shop pro and taping many sheets of paper together to make the outline.

    Then I hand painted some canvas in the shape and colours of the logo, adding some painted flowers to make it a bit more individual.

    Making the writing was a bit more tricky – painting flowers is one thing but the accuracy needed for lettering isn’t a skill I’ve learnt yet. But I found some special transfer paper which would show up on black fabric, so again did the enlarging trick. Then I remembered I had to reverse the letters! So I repeated the enlarging trick the correct way this time (!) and transferred the image onto the black fabric.

    Here she is – just over a metre tall, and on view at Peña events in London.
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