A feast for the eyes, and a festival full of soul.

We asked Oxford canal based artist Karis Harrington to create her impression of the future Kilsby.

She took the main aims of the project - heritage, creativity, community & accessibility - and meticulously recreated them, with added buckets of her much-loved fantastical flair.

 We now have this printed on a 6ft banner. It will come with us wherever we go until the real deal floats back into town. Thank you Karis for putting your heart and soul into this wild and watery scene.

 The Oxford Canal Festival - what a smasher!

 We hope many of you were able to head down to Aristotle lane and enjoy all the festivities last weekend. The atmosphere was wonderful, a real celebration of everything canal and community, and a great expression of the generosity of spirit shown by Bill Manville and the team of festival volunteers.

Thank you to everyone who visited the Kilsby tent - all the little hands that grappled with the shadow puppets, all the poets who conjured up a canal themed magnet poem, and all of you who just came to have a catch-up!

Thank you also to the 15 volunteers who came and helped at the Kilsby stall - from wrestling with the marquee toggles, to helping the kids make shadow puppet dinosaurs - your help was very much appreciated.

 We'll gather all the lovely photos and videos we took and upload them here on our website. In the meantime you can enjoy some very nice ones in this Oxford Mail article.

And finally...introducing Luis

Luis has joined the team as a communications volunteer. We are forging ahead with preserving traditional skills, but we need to get a bit better at the more modern skill of celebrating it on social media.  You may have met Luis at the canal festival where he spent all day gathering vox pops so we can spread the Kilsby story far and wide. Welcome Luis.

That's all for now. Thanks for making it to the bottom. Have a lovely week wherever you are.