In 2024 Kiri started experimenting with pyrography (free hand burning of designs into wood). So far this has mainly been on hand-cleft birch wood

In the process of setting up a community garden in our area, we wanted to create raised beds / planters so that the majority of the beds could be tended from a sitting position (to make it an accessible garden). A local business had donated some pallets they no longer wanted, so once we had dismantled them and removed the nails, we built some planters

This was our fourth advent window – this time created with masking tape instead of electrical tape (in the hope that it would be easier to clean off… in fact it was harder to clean off!). Luke 1v78-79 in the New Living Translation reads:

Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace.

This was our third advent window and we wanted to draw a parallel between Jesus as a refugee and those who had fled Ukraine in 2022. As with the previous year, this was created mainly with tissue paper and electrical tape, but with paint mixed with PVA glue for the wording

Our front bay window looks out onto a fairly busy thoroughfare so during COVID we created our first advent window using paint mixed with PVA glue and tissue paper… which sort of worked. This window was our second attempt the following year, with the lines instead created with electrical tape. We put a lamp behind the window so that the light-filled message would shine out in the darkness

During the first COVID lockdown in 2020, we spent a few hours putting together a Lego stop-motion animation film recounting the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus. That first video probably took around 4 or 5 hours to make in total, but over time as we made more and more of these bible story stop-motion videos, we pushed ourselves to create more and more elaborate sets and more ambitious movement. The last video we made probably took around 20 hours to make. You can read more about how we made the videos in a blog post from July 2020

In 2019 we re-designed the logo of St Paul and St Stephen’s church, Gloucester. The three themes that the congregation wanted to be communicated through the logo were the physical location, community and transformation. The shape and angle of the main cross that runs through the centre of the new logo is directly taken from a map of the crossroads on Stroud Road, at which St Paul and St Stephen’s stands. The OS map symbol for a church can be seen in the top left quadrant of the cross, in the exact position in which the church can be found if the logo is viewed as a map. The main cross shape shows that Jesus is at the centre of the church and community. In a lighter shade of green, four arrows point towards the centre, these symbolise inclusivity and welcome, inviting people from all walks of life to join the church. Viewed along with the four circles in darker green, these arrows become people with their arms raised in praise. The colour green represents growth, renewal and new life. Green is also the colour used to represent ‘ordinary time’ within the church year.

In 2017, we wrote a small python script for a RaspberryPi that would take a photo every 15 minutes in the daytime (calculated based on the python astral library) using an attached webcam and add a watermark and upload the picture to the web. Then, once a month in the hours of darkness, the code would generate a video timelapse (averaging the white balance of each picture) and upload that to the web. In 2018, we set up a raspberry pi and webcam in the orchard at Penhurst Retreat Centre and set it going… with limited success! The above is one of the resulting videos where the whole month worked!

In 2018 we re-designed and re-wrote the website for St Paul and St Stephen’s church in Gloucester. This was our first “mobile-first” web design where we designed it first for mobile devices, then adapted it for larger screens. We drew on much of the functionality of the St Mark’s website – the events calendar, the highlights on the front page, but we also brought the latest sermon recording onto the front page too. We also wanted all of the key information for a new visitor visible on every page, so we designed the footer of each page to have service times, contact details and a map of where the church is

We were commissioned to re-write a website for a private tutor. The previous iteration of the website had many different illustration of a compass, but these were from different sources and in different styles. So our customer asked Kiri to put together a set of compass illustrations that would be more consistent and uniform for the new site.