If you are local to Somerset you may have heard me on Charlie Taylor's BBC Radio Somerset Breakfast Show as I welcomed the very lovely Mel Everett to Natty Deco head quarters for the weekly Hire Mel feature that goes out each week.
Everything was arranged in secret with the show's production team over the past few months leading up to the show, then with the help of a few clues Mel is directed to a Somerset based business to be 'hired out' for the day and a chance to look behind the scenes, this week it was a chance to work with me!
With our local Snowdrop Festival due to take place in a few weeks time (I will be featuring this in my next blog post) I had everything set up in advance ready to guide Mel through the process of preparing some of the beautiful Snowdrop decorations that are very popular at this time of year.
After a demonstration of how the Laser Cutter works and the different cutting effects that I use, we soon got going on importing files, and setting them up ready for cutting.
Mel soon got the hang of this and as the machine set to work we moved across the workshop to the paint station and set about finishing some cuts I had preparred earlier (in true Blue Peter style!) using some gorgeous, highly pigmented, eco friendly paints.
As the Snowdrops were left to dry I prepared a goody bag for Mel to thank her for her time. As you can see we had a lot of fun together in the course of the day; the sessions were all recorded on a phone app (I had been expecting a huge fluffy microphone and a lot of cables) and sent back to the studio where the team very cleverly edited down the audio files (and lots of my mistakes and our chuckling!); the final edits were then ready to schedule into the morning show the following day.
My thanks to all at BBC Radio Somerset for making this happen, it was a fabulous day and so lovely to meet Mel in person (I'm a regular listener to the Breakfast show as I am usually pottering about in the workshop in the early hours, and often phone in with stories for Charlie, Mel, and co.).
My thanks too to my good pal Jonny Derrick who very patiently took these photographs - cheers Jonny!
The feature was broadcast on Thursday 6th Feb, should you wish to listen, please follow the link to BBC Sounds :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0kk16cb