Thanks to Clare taking for the photos and writing this piece and on our latest Soupa event at WOW festival:

Soupa was invited by Storm in a Teacup to host a zine making workshop at The Southbank Centre today and yesterday for a new festival called WOW – Women of the World which kicked off on Friday with a live of broadcast of the brilliant BBC Woman’s Hour.

Although, there’s a lot to cover, I’ll keep it brief and tell you about some of things we did (with the aid of a few pics).

In preparation for the festival we made our own special edition Soupa Zine (above) containing lots of exciting new illustrations, photographs and bite-size stories. You can read the zine in full here: http://issuu.com/jospencer/docs/soupazine-mar-2011-23

We made little packs for each zine maker who came to the workshop and we also took along our fantastic retro typewriter which I picked up for about £2 in a recycling centre.

I did a bit of typing to encourage people to give it a go – blank white pages can be a bit intimidating!

While many of the zines contained important messages about women’s issues, we also wanted people to relax, have fun and be creative. Fellow Soupa member, illustrator Elissa Elwick brought along her friendly characters, the Bob Wob’s (watching you from above, and below) and was on hand with Anna Spencer to help people create their own illustrations.

Throughout the day, there was live music and this seemed to attract a lot of people to the workshop – all of whom worked really hard creating something unique to them. As you can see, the workspace was a mess with glue, cuttings and pencils everywhere, but as far as I’m concerned, all the better to take pictures of.

I took five minutes out to catch up on the other events going on at the festival and headed downstairs where I met Mary Kilvert, an illustrator who makes products which include these pretty cushions. Loving the one of these print-perfect sheep!

I was glad we had taken some old magazines for cutting up as these were providing some unexpected inspiration for zines (thanks to my sister for passing them on to me). The illustration below is a great example of this.

Over the weekend, the Soupa team are helping to create a Master WOW Zine that will be a lasting reminder of the amazing work created.

If you came along to WOW this weekend, we hope you had a really good time!

Posted by Clare Kelly

We will be uploading our pictures from the weekend to our Flickr stream very soon.