Saturday 4 October 2014

125 Years of Morris Dancing

4th October 2014


We were very grateful today to have Roy Smith giving a talk, one of the leading Morris Men in the north west of England and historically quite a significant figure in the art. He was responsible for the book produced for Leyland Morris Men's centenary and has undertaken a tremendous amount of work collecting photographs and reminiscences of the early days of the Morris Men.

Click image to play video


We were pleased to have him here today because not only is he a great exponent himself but he is so very knowledgeable on the subject.

Roy is particularly keen in collecting old photographs of the Morris Men and hopes to identify new trends and individuals and if you wished to contact him on this he would be very pleased to hear from you. He is also doing a lot of work with us at the museum trying to trace early film of the Morris Men as he suspects the earliest film of morris dancing is actually of the Leyland Morris Men in east Lancashire in 1902. We know the 1905 Leyland Festival was very carefully filmed by Mitchell and Kenyon and we are hoping to have this at the museum for our Festival Exhibition planned for 2015.


Do visit the Leyland Morris Men website at www.leylandmorrismen.co.uk

Functional Origami

27th September 2014


Local paper folding expert Stephen Watson was with us again for one of our Saturday activities.  This time the theme was functional origami, Items that could be used around the home.

Models folded by all those who attended were decorative vases, boxes, ornamental napkins and one young lady is now an expert at book and bottle wrapping using Furoshiki the Japanese art of Fabric Folding!

Visit Stephens website at www.foldpaper.co.uk and have a go yourself by following one of his video tutorials