: General

Walking for Health at St Fagans

Loveday Williams, 12 August 2016

This week we welcomed the lovely Croeso Club from Caerphilly to St Fagans. They are an informal community group set up by a local resident, Sandra Hardacre, almost ten years ago. The group aims to support community members to learn new skills, be sociable with others and go on new adventures.

Over the last 6 weeks they have been working with Groundwork Cymru to help to pilot a new project called Go Green 4 Health, which is all about inspiring, supporting and encouraging individuals to use the outdoors to be more active. Each session focuses on a different aspect of using the outdoors for activity, such as ‘the benefits to being outdoors’, ‘overcoming barriers’ and ‘’staying safe’.

For their last walk the group members had asked if they could come to St Fagans, so Flik Walls, project coorindator, got in touch with us at the Museum and we set it up.

We planned a 30 minute walk, taking in some of the key buildings at St Fagans such as Nant Wallter Cottage, Rhyd-y-Car Terrace Houses and the Oakdale Workmen's Institute, of which some of the ladies had very fond memories.

We also made sure there was plenty of time to stop for a coffee and piece of cake on our way around. This was a perfect chance for the ladies to talk about their experiences of being part of the Go Green 4 Health project and share their thoughts and feedback with myself, the Groundwork Team and the project evaluator Katy Marrin. It was also a lovely opportunity for the group to share poems some of them had written about their journey together. Here's a lovely poem written by Lyn:

Go Green 4 Health Poem

Two lovely people came to coax us all to walk,

To ramble and enjoy ourselves and also have a talk.

 

We played walking bingo, I’m sure it was a fix,

Next we all said poems that was a real mix.

 

A lovely trip to Trelewis Park, fresh air and loads of rests,

Caerphilly Castle we went next, soaked through right to our vests.

 

And what about walking football that we were meant to play,

They said there was some cheating, ‘we were robbed’ I heard them say.

 

The last walk sadly to St Fagan’s, a fab day out for all,

So now the Croeso Club love walking, they’ve really had a ball.

 

We are really looking forward to developing a link with Groundwork Cymru so we can continue to work together on similar projects in the future. Follow this blog for updates and to find out how it's all going.
 
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Community Engagement  General  Learning   St Fagans National Museum of History Making History Project 

museum.wales turns rainbow coloured for Pride Cymru

Chris Owen, 12 August 2016

To celebrate Pride Cymru coming to Cardiff this weekend, our homepage has had a little touch of colour applied to it. If you use Safari on the Mac, you may notice another special feature - your browser's toolbar itself is emblazoned with rainbow colours.

If you use Safari regularly, you'll be familiar with the visual effect that sees page colours slip behind the browser toolbar as you scroll. It's a neat effect but I hadn't heard of a site actively utilising it before and I wondered if, with a bit of HTML, CSS & JavaScript, we could fix a set of colours there. The vibrant rainbow colours of Pride seemed like the perfect fit. In this blog entry, I'll describe in tedious/fascinating* (*delete as appropriate) technical detail how we achieved it.

The Technique

At first I tried setting the margin of my element to a negative value to push it into the toolbar area. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't work - it's simply not displayed. The actual solution was almost as simple itself and we were pretty pleased with the result.

To start off, all we need are two divs.

<body>
    <div id="toolbar-colours">…</div>
    <div id="content-frame">…</div>
</body>

The first div will contain the colours we want to show in our toolbar. We give this a fixed height, 150px in this example.

The second div will contain our content. We give this a fixed width and height of 100vw and 100vh. This means it will neatly and seamless fill the browser viewport area.

#rainbow_toolbar
{
	background-color: #b20034;
	height: 2px;
	display: flex; /* We actually use Sass includes for cross-browser flex-box support */
	width: 100%;
	padding: 0;
	margin: 0;
}

#rainbow_toolbar.safari_trick
{
	height: 150px;
}

#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block
{
	flex: 1;
	height: 4px;
	padding: 0;
	margin: 0;
}

#rainbow_toolbar.safari_trick .colour_block
{
	height: 130px;
}

#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.violet { background-color: #9400d3; }
#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.indigo { background-color: #4b0082; }
#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.blue { background-color: #0000ff; }
#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.green { background-color: #00ff00; }
#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.yellow { background-color: #ffff00; }
#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.orange { background-color: #ff7f00; }
#rainbow_toolbar .colour_block.red { background-color: #ff0000; }

Using a little JavaScript, we can make sure that we're always scrolled past the first div, making it colour the browser toolbar.

$(window).scroll(function() {

    if ($(window).scrollTop() < 150) {
        $(window).scrollTop(150);
    }
});
$(window).scrollTop(50);

The only thing remaining is to sort out our scrollbars which are giving the game away. We hide the main browser scrollbar and give our content-frame a standard-looking scrollbar instead.

::-webkit-scrollbar
{ 
    visibility: hidden; 
    display: none;
}
				
#content-frame
{
	background-color: #e4e4e4;
	height: 100vh;
	width: 100vw;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	overflow-y: scroll;
}
					
#content-frame::-webkit-scrollbar
{ 
	display: initial;
	visibility: visible;
	background: #f4f4f4;
	color: #ffffff;
}
		
#content-frame::-webkit-scrollbar-track
{
	background-color: #f4f4f4;
	border-radius: 8px;
}
		
#content-frame::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb
{
	width: 4px;
	border-radius: 8px;
	background-color: #b4b4b4;
	border: 3px #f4f4f4 solid;
}

There are few more JavaScript tricks we can use to tidy up our implementation. This includes managing the up arrow and page-up keys which create a visual glitch:

// disable page up and arrow up when at top of content
window.addEventListener('keydown', function(e) {
	
	if( $('#content-frame').scrollTop() <= 0 && [33, 38].indexOf(e.keyCode) > -1 ) {
		e.preventDefault();
	}
}, false);

The Caveats

It's a neat little trick but also somewhat of a hack. Putting your content in a scrolling div carries a small but noticeable performance penalty when scrolling and when using a touchpad to scroll you may get an occasional visual glitch. Finally, it is only available to Mac-based Safari users. No other combination of OS and browser has the translucent toolbar effect for us to take advantage of. For this reason, it's not something I'd want to use for a lengthy period of time. But for one weekend only, here it is.

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Community Family Learning at St Fagans

Loveday Williams, 9 August 2016

Over the summer we are working with ACE Action Ely Caerau (Communities First) to put together a series of fun and accessible family workshops and activities for local families. The programme was developed ahead of time with ACE and includes sessions such as:

Traditional Toys

Wash Day with Beti Bwt

Rag Rug Making

Life in the Iron Age

Pond Dipping

Pottery

So far we have had lots of fun making rag rugs, learning about and playing with traditional toys, discovering what life was like for our ancestors living in the Iron Age and experiencing what it was like to go to school in Victorian Wales.

Making Rag Rugs

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Community Engagement  General  Learning   Museums, Exhibitions and Events  St Fagans National Museum of History Making History Project 

National Museum Cardiff’s 1980 sculpture exhibition for blind visitors

Stephanie Roberts, 8 August 2016

Did you know that an exhibition of sculpture for the blind was held at National Museum Cardiff in 1980?

Neither did I until a colleague of mine mentioned it recently. Intrigued, I did some digging to find out more.

The exhibition was the first of its kind in the Museum. It brought together 10 sculptures of different materials and textures which blind and visually impaired visitors were invited to touch. Rodin's 'Illusions Fallen to Earth', and Frederic Leighton's 'Needless Alarm', which shows a nude female figure startled by a frog, were among the works on display.

To protect the works, a thin layer of burnished wax was applied and visitors wore gloves with the fingertips cut off to reduce the risk of damage from rings or watches. It would be interesting to know what conservators today would advise!

Rubber mats and carpets were used to help lead visitors to the plinths, and the Museum's Friends were on hand to guide visitors around and engage them in conversation about the works.

To complement the exhibition and add a multisensory dimension there was also a display of seasonal scented plants and spices from the Botany collection!

Even though this exhibition was held almost 40 years ago, it is interesting how little has changed. All of the challenges they faced back then – how to strike a balance between conservation and accessibility, how to help orientate visitors, and introducing a multi-sensory element – are ones we’ve been thinking about recently.

We haven’t got a new exhibition planned (although it’s something to think about for the future!), but we have been working with members of Cardiff Institute for the Blind on a series of audio description tours. These tours will be offered to blind and visually impaired visitors starting this October.

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The Museum's gone Quentin Blake and Roald Dahl Crazy!

Haf Neale, 5 August 2016

Since the launch of the Quentin Blake exhibition our inbox has been filling up, and the phone hasn’t stopped with fellow Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake superfans wanting to know more about what's going on. Everyone wants to get involved! So I thought I’d share a little bit of what’s been happening so far.

The Exhibition

People have been coming along to draw in the gallery and already our wall is bursting with wonderful drawings.

Want to join in?  https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/8916/Quentin-Blake-Inside-Stories/

Activity Booklet

Our activity booklets have been flying out and the competition entries have been coming in thick and fast!

To draw your way around the museum and take part in the competition, just pop in to the Clore Discovery centre to get your very own booklet https://museum.wales/cardiff/clore/

Family Workshop 

Families have been making some really nice little storybooks of their very own.  

 

Teachers

We have a teacher's pack in both Welsh and English that will help you explore the exhibition with your class - https://museum.wales/media/38707/QB-FINAL.pdf  

Cymraeg - https://amgueddfa.cymru/media/38708/QB-FINAL-cy.pdf

If you would like to bring your class to the museum all the information you need about booking is available at - https://museum.wales/cardiff/learning/booking_information/

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General  Learning   Museums, Exhibitions and Events 
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