August 2006:
So far there have been 11 technical training sessions to help prepare the project workers, who will be making the recordings. In addition to this the project played host to Frances Cambrook, an accredited trainer from the Oral History Society, who gave us an inspiring one day workshop on oral history practice and techniques.

The project officer and some of the project workers have also been visiting local groups and events, publicising the project and meeting potential contributors.

The recording of the first interviews began in the middle of April 2006 and over the next six months the recordings will be returned to the Coach House and will be copied, catalogued and have detailed summaries made of their contents. When this is complete they can be archived at the museum and at the Dorset History Centre.

September - October 2006:

We are very grateful for the patience of those contributors who have not yet been interviewed. We are hoping to be able to complete the interviewing process by Christmas 2006. The interviews coming in are being digitised, transferred to CD and short extracts from some of the interviews are being edited to be uploaded onto the recordings page of the website. These should be available for listening soon. Maggie Postle and Alison MacDermott are doing a fantastic job of listening to all the incoming interviews, logging their contents as well as preparing transcripts of the website extracts. We hope that the extracts will give people an idea of the scope of our oral history archive which will be available for research at the Local History Centre, Gundry Lane, Bridport from winter 2007.

We are being leant and given the most wonderful photos of the area and of our contributors, we hope to be sharing some of these, also via the website.

Our Spinning Yarns community artist Elina Jokippi is holding an open meeting on Saturday October 21st from 2pm – 4pm at the Coach House, Gundry Lane, Bridport. Her exciting project involves participants listening to some of our collected recordings and working together on recreating local scenes that they will choose, restage and photograph. The resulting images will be hung in the museum as part of our project exhibition in June 2007. If you are interested in taking part then please do come along – or if you want to know more you can contact Catherine Simmonds 01935 891044. There is more information about this activity on the ‘Artists’ page of this website.

Stephen Rowley is our project artist in schools. He will be working with 3 local schools and their teachers to make a radio recording comprised of original features written and recorded by students using our oral history recordings as their starting point. More information about this project is also on the ‘Artists’ page of the website.

Coming Soon: Extracts of our first recordings will become available on this website in the Recordings section. They'll be added to over the course of the project, so please come back to hear what’s new.

Project News November/December 06

On the 7th November 2006 Spinning Yarns passed its milestone anniversary of a year in action. Over 70 interviews have now been collected and the work of preparing summaries of the recordings, transferring them to digital form and editing extracts for the website goes on.
On the 3rd November the project's schools artist: Stephen Rowley visited selected year 5 & 6 students in three local schools: St Mary's Primary, Marshwood Primary and Bridport Primary - to introduce his radio project: Jurassic FM -which will see students writing, rehearsing and performing their own radio features inspired by some of the Spinning Yarns recordings that they have been exploring with their teachers. All three schools will come together in early 2007 for a live radio day where all the pieces will be performed and recorded by the students with Stephen masterminding the event. The finished radio show will be edited and mastered by Stephen and produced as a CD and will be made available in the community and on the project website

Elina Jokipii launched the community arts project on October 21st. Three photo shoots will take place on January 20th; March 10th and May 12th where participants will be restaging community scenes based on extracts from the project's oral history recordings. These will make a set of unusual full-colour prints which will form part of the June 2007 Bridport Museum Spinning Yarns Project exhibition.
Short audio extracts from our growing archive of recordings are now up and running on the recordings page of this website. This collection will be added to over the next six months and we hope this will provide an opportunity for people with West Dorset connections everywhere, including any far flung family of our fantastic contributors, to share in our project's findings. We will be lauching the webiste officially after Christmas.

Spinning Yarns, a 20 month long project, funded by the Heritage Lottery will come to an end in August 2007 by which time the archive of recordings that the project has collected will be placed at the Dorset History Centre and will form part of the Local History Centre's resources for future research

Spinning Yarns has a team of 12 interviewers. They are: Colin Bowditch; Celia Carmichael; Sally Collings; Michael Corgan; Mary-Kay Cresswell; Mary Hart; Jenny Makepeace; Jenny Jefferson; Catherine Simmonds; Hazel Topham; Bob Vincent & Gini Astley. They are currently engaged interviewing contributors around the project area.

Project News January 07

The Spinning Yarns Project took the opportunity to officially launch its project website at a launch party on the morning of the 8th January. Despite terrible weather it was a jolly event. David Seckers from The Heritage Lottery Fund joined us from Exeter and made a warm and encouraging speech and we were delighted to have both Mr and Mrs Marsh with us, who braved the wet and windy weather to come and join the party. They were among the first of our contributors to be interviewed (by project interviewer Mary Hart) back in May 2006 and were also among the first of our contributors to be put up on the website in audio form. Brian Neesam, our project photographer photographed the gathering: a mix of Spinning Yarns project workers, museum staff as well as guests from the town, the press and the West Dorset history scene. Gina Dessalines from Pilgrim Design, Honiton who designed the project logo and designs and maintains the website was also with us and we were very pleased to have the opportunity to showcase her fine work.

Stephen Rowley – the Spinning Yarns schools artist is running his Jurassic FM workshops in three local primary schools on the 18th, 19th; 25th and 26 of January, culminating in the live radio day on Thursday February 1st. More about this project is available under the ‘Artists’ link.
Elina Jokipii is coordinating the first of the Community arts photo shoots this Saturday at the Coach House from 10 am when she will be photographing a restaging of a domestic scene - inspired by the memories of Hilda Youngs, who we met and interviewed at Chancery House. This scene involves a schools inspector calling to find out why Symondsbury Primary school children are not in school!
If you would like to get involved in any of the other community arts shoots they are taking place on Saturday March 10th at West Bay and Saturday May 12th down by the sea (venue TBC). More details are under the ‘Artists’ link. Please contact Catherine on 01935 891044 if you would like to become involved.

January, February and March 07

....have seen two out of three of the project’s Community Arts photo shoots completed. Scenes from the oral history archive were restaged and photographed using members of the community and children from Salway Ash Primary School at The Coach House, Gundry Lane and at West Bay by Elina Jokipii, our community artist. Some documentary shots can be seen under Elina’s Artists section of the website. The final prints will form part of the Spinning Yarns exhibition which opens on July 16th in the Keech Gallery of Bridport Museum.

Stephen Rowley finished the production phase of his Jurassic FM project in February – culminating in a live recording day where pupils from years 5 & 6 came together from 3 local primary schools to perform and record material they had written and prepared in response to Stephen’s production workshops. They used extracts and clips from the Spinning Yarns archives, as well as from their own research and interviews to write and perform a wide variety of radio features from jingles to news, jokes to gardening advice and of course – their very own weather reports. The finished hour long show: Jurassic FM will be available to listen to and download from the website shortly and will also be part of the project’s summer exhibition.
The oral history loan boxes should be available after Easter and are there for any school or local group who would like to learn to interview and record oral history for their own research purposes. Of course we hope you will share your recordings with us and we can add them to our growing archive. To date we have made 110 recorded interviews and are still collecting.