This 1950's music reminiscence craft combines creating with music. Create and paint your own printable and play the corresponding play list for best results! www.speckled.com.au/printables

Huddled with ears glued to a radio or hunched over a record player, teenagers had never heard anything like it before. It was wild and free and ripped the dull fabric of life. They called it "Rock & Roll" and it quickly became an obsession and a way of life.
The power of music to unlock memories is universal. Colour or Paint in these 1950's singers and remember Rockabilly, Rhythm and Blues and the joy of Rock and Roll!

This series of Music and Memory printables includes 8 singing stars from the 1950's, from the boisterous Jerry Lee Louis and Little Richard through to the beautiful sounds of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. Accompany with playlist of the songs for best results!
www.speckled.com.au/printables

When people with dementia collage (with self selected cut outs from magazines), they often choose the same theme consistently. It's usually based on special memories and experiences from their past. For example, a mother may collage about children and family life. A former accountant may collage figures and numbers.
Creating collages can help us explore memories and messages from our inner world. Although dementia gradually robs one of memory, one's self of self and identity often remains.
This collage uses 1950's Vivian Maier street photography and vintage aspic and jelly recipes to encourage discussion around 50's life and cooking.

There was once a time in Australia, when man's patriotic identity depended on whether you were a ‘Ford Man’ or a ‘Holden Man.’
Keenly felt in suburban driveways, the era of the 6 cylinder muscle car had dawned. By the mid 1960's, flanked in twin fins and a wrap around windscreen, Holden led car sales in Australia by almost 3 to 1 over Ford.
Read about Australians’ love of Holden cars and colour in or paint your own Vintage Car place cards. Place on dining table at meal times and enjoy the bonus conversation starter jokes on the back!
www.speckled.com.au/printables

Who am I?
I was twelve years younger and one inch taller than my husband to be. In 1981 we wed to a TV audience of millions. I wore a silk taffeta wedding dress, with 10,000 hand sewn pearls. Five extra wedding dresses were made, 27 cakes were baked, 30 choirboys sang, and even a chef was appointed to inspect every single cherry, currant, raisin and sultana that was to go into the wedding cake for perfect plumpness. It was to be nothing short of flawless. Sadly though fairytale weddings do not make for fairytale endings. My legacy lives on through my two sons William and Harry.

Bedazzle, colour in, paint and decorate this Princess Diana coat hanger cover and watch her glam up any wardrobe space

Tupperware parties swept across America, Australia and the UK in the 1950's like a flash fire. Bell tumblers, wonder bowls and two-ounce midget containers become as common as television, telephones and hula hoops. Gatherings of suburban housewives nibbled on cream puffs and devilled eggs as they bought up a pastel palette of food storage containers.

Colour in or paint your own paper people Tupperware party guests and seat them onto a desktop, fireplace or shelf!
http://www.speckled.com.au/printables

Reminiscence therapy involves discussing and sharing past memories. With Alzheimer’s, memories are lost in reverse order. Memories formed most recently are more fleeting than those from many years ago. As caregivers in Aged Care, making yesteryear, not yesterday, the focus of conversation can give great comfort to residents with dementia, giving them a sense of value and peace.
Reminiscence Art is the creative process of exploring memories. One way is to use props such as everyday household items, clothing, old books, magazines and photos from the 1950's – 1980's as a means of triggering memories from the past, then running an art activity based on the vintage aide or prop.
Speckled provides a free printable activities resource for Aged Care facilities to use with their residents. Each printable comes with a story and a vintage themed craft activity to aide the stroll down memory lane.
http://www.speckled.com.au/printables

Avacado green, mission brown, wheat  and retro orange were very popular colours in the 70's.  They were used in carpets, curtains, homewares, fabrics and wallpapers. Orange was present in shades of burnt orange, coral, ochre and sunshine.
There was once a time when retro orange was a feature colour, used along shiny laminate bench tops, draped along curtains, wrapped around linen lampshades and printed all over wallpaper.

Do you remember retro orange?
Paint your own paper place mats with retro orange flowers and brighten up your dining space.

Christmas comes early for me this year as will be having baby number three very soon.
Whilst on maternity leave from Speckled, I will be checking email from time to time over the coming months, so feel free to contact me with any queries regarding art and craft classes in aged care in the New Year.
Merry Christmas and Happy holidays!

When you're walking through the silence of a white-walled art gallery and you stop to read the brief description next to a painting, it will tell you the when, where and who of it. It can be easy to miss the enormity of what's going on in some of those paintings. Recently I read that when Pablo Picasso was seventy five, he painted 58 versions of a 17th century painting by Velázquez: Las Meninas. Fifty eight!! What fascinated him so? It piqued my interest to delve a little further... and what interesting research it was, I ended up writing a piece on it.
Life before Facebook: Re-branding reality, it's been going on forever!
The corresponding craft activity for aged care residents will be a Las Meninas inspired napkin holder.

For today's art class at a Sydney nursing home we crafted around the theme of remembering tea time. With a traditional set of tea cups from the 60's as props, we spoke about the popularity of flowers and roses as patterns on tea cups, and the gold paint trims that were popular at the time. As the ladies sipped their morning tea, we painted floral tea cups to use as bookmarks. Deep in concentration, the residents enjoyed seeing how a blob of pink paint can be turned into a rose, and how easily more details can be added to flowers and leaves to make them pop. All appreciated the little pompom tied around the teacup handle to page mark and leave out of the book.

This weeks art class focused on the theme of remembering Tupperware and the foods that people made and stored in Tupperware containers in the 60's and 70's (like fruit in jelly.) One of the men shared a story about how his wife had bought and hosted many a Tupperware party, asking "can you still buy Tupperware today?"
As we painted our fruits in jelly, conversation flowed to other things people did in the 60's and 70's, like travelling to the Rainbow Valley in the Northern Territory to paint landscapes!

"I started painting at 88," mentioned one of the men at this weeks art class. He had been a food technologist in the past. He pointed out an abstract on canvas he was working on and spoke about how how he loved to paint in layers. He wasn't at all bothered that today we would be painting paper toilet roll dolls!
I passed my vintage crotchet toilet roll doll around and many remembered having these, or seeing these atop toilets in the 1950's and 60's. One of the ladies mentioned never liking their blank gaze, whilst another found them to be a very feminine way to disguise a toilet roll.
We painted in pastels, pink and blues, much like the colours of bathrooms of the 50's. As the tea man came round with tea and crackers he requested that all dolls be blonde as blondes have more fun, and all obliged in good spirits. Once our paper dolls were dry, we wrapped them around a toilet roll and all left happily with their practical and pretty craft doll in tow.

Lately I've been thinking about how art and craft initiatives have been funded and implemented in different parts of the world, providing elderly people living in the community and also aged care facilities, all sorts of new opportunities and positive experiences. It's wonderful that the ball is rolling on this.
Recently I wrote a piece on Social Prescribing for Starts at Sixty:
For a full excerpt: Is it Time for more than Medicine?

A few of the ladies mentioned that when they were growing up, only people who lived by the sea or could afford to go on family holidays knew how to swim. We compared this to how it is these days, the parents grumbling about early weekend swim lessons for their kids.

We talked about the changing fashion of swim bathers and Esther Williams, who in her hey day swam her way to movie fame. It was a good morning for both young and old. A big thank you to the parents who lent their kids for a colourful, fun and playful craft day!

Reminiscing is storytelling. Stories come to life when someone shares their story with you. As you get to know them better, you see what life was like through their eyes at a certain time and place.
 Holding and interacting with objects and images from the past helps the elderly to engage with and recollect past life experiences and communicate those to a listener.
Speckled provides a free printable activities resource for Aged Care facilities to use with their residents. Each printable comes with a story and vintage themed craft to aide the stroll down memory lane.
http://www.speckled.com.au/printables