24th June 2021
A group of adults with learning disabilities in the Armagh area have been extremely busy over the past few months.
This group, who are based at St Luke’s Hospital site in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, have been creating lockdown canvas with help from Eddie Rafferty from Arts Care. These canvases allowed the group members to paint how lockdown has affected them by depicting what they see when the look out the window during COVID-19 restrictions. The group painted what they missed about ordinary life which included activities like swimming, their friends and missing events like family weddings.
These canvases took dedication and hard work and were completed after five weeks. They were meant to take part in an exhibition; however, due to continued COVID-19 restrictions this could unfortunately not happen.
The group now have begun to make handmade summer wreaths, which have gorgeous plastic flowers meaning they will last all summer. The purpose of this is to decorate house doors signalling the end of COVID-19 restrictions. The group are hoping these beautiful summer wreaths will be sold as part of Friends of the Arc sales. The flowers cost between £15 -£20 and the summer wreaths will be unique and customers can order their own colour scheme and how many flowers they would like in these wreaths. The money raised will go towards the group itself and costs associated with making the summer wreaths. Any profits will be used to purchase additional supplies for subsequent group activities.
Summer wreaths can be ordered by messaging Friends of the Arc on Facebook or emailing friendsofthearc@outlook.com