Blaby Library Community Project
The Blaby Story Trail project was an exciting community project that took place from August 2024-March 2025, with Artist and Storyteller Jessica Harthorne.
The trail explores Blaby’s history and places of interest as you guide Ollie the Owl through his adventures.
Over 200 local people helped create this trail. Children at Thistly Meadow Primary School chose the stops, developed the characters, and wrote the story. Students at Countesthorpe Academy created the artwork to bring these places, characters and stories to life. Finally, local families designed the title artwork and took part in piloting the trail, where based on their feedback we added an extra stop.
Our journey, from start to finish!
Co-creation is always at the heart of every project we undertake, and we wanted to involve the wider community in choosing the focus of our project.
We identified four potential projects and then ran a consultation for 3 weeks, with the public. We had 230 people respond and it was a great mix of library users and non-users.
With the results in we decided to go ahead with the Story Trail project that would include featuring AR artwork. In the end, we were really excited to be able to include elements of all four suggested ideas into our final project.
Inspiring creativity and sparking imagination.
What followed was a handful of fun-filled workshops, developed and facilitated by illustrator and storyteller Jessica Hartshorn Thistly Meadow Primary School
The Year 6 class really stepped up to the challenges that Jessi set for them! The class achieved so much during their workshops, including:
- Discussing and choosing the locations for the stop on our Story Trail
- Debating the choices for the main character and deciding on ‘Ollie the Owl’
- Taking a walk to visit each of the stops to gain inspiration for our story
- Deciding on a character for Ollie the Owl to interact with at each stop
- Working in small groups to write a segment of the story for every location and presenting them to the class
- Drawing their characters and using paint to bring them to life
Countesthorpe Academy 
A small group of young talented young picked then picked up the story from the Y6 class and used their ideas, stories and art to develop the characters further. The group produced some amazing artwork over four workshops that included:
- Finding out about the characters, locations and stories that the Thistly Meadow children decided on
- Taking a tour of the Story Trail to gain understanding of the details that needed to be considered when further developing the characters
- Sketching initial designs for their characters
- Refining their characters and adding colour
- Experimenting with adding Augmented Reality to their art
- Learning about the career of an artist and creative practitioner through a presentation from Jessi
Blaby Community
We invited local Blaby families to attend workshops in December 2024. Families designed the title artwork and helped us finish off the illustration by completing the last few characters and locations remaining from the College sessions. Some of these families, alongside some new faces, took part in pilot workshops where half completed the digital version of the trail, and half completed the paper version. We received some great feedback that resulted in an extra stop being included in the final trail.
We are so proud of how the Story Trail was created by Blaby residents, represents the Blaby community, and can be used by both locals and visitors for years to come.