My Perfect Weekend: Wen Boylin talks about her love for Article Cafe and bone carving

Whanganui early childhood teacher and storyteller Wen Boylin talks about her perfect weekend in Whanganui. Photo / Bevan Conley

Each week, we speak to a member of the Whanganui community to ask what their perfect weekend in the region would be. This week, Eva de Jong catches up with Wen Boylin, a Whanganui early childhood teacher.

My husband and I both work on Fridays, so we usually like a chilled Friday night. We might go to our friends’ houses, but usually we have a family movie night. Then we’ll get takeaways because no one wants to cook.

We’ll order pizza or buy wonton soup from Pizza Kingdom or Happy Takeaways, then that’s dinner sorted.

We’re quite busy on Saturdays. In the morning, we’ll have the boys’ winter football, then straight after that they’ll have their drum lessons. When that’s all finished at around 1.30pm, we might go to Kowhai Park and walk the dog; sometimes if we feel up to it, we might go to Virginia Lake or Bushy Park.

We’re actually fostering a dog at the moment - her name is Meg. She’s so cute and sweet.

If it’s a rainy day, we might do crafts in the afternoon in our garage. Sometimes I’ll arrange a bone carving workshop with our friend Martin, who teaches my sons bone carving. He’s a really great carver and teacher, so my boys both love him. He’ll do a two-hour workshop, or sometimes a whole day.

He uses beef bone or deer antlers and he teaches them the basic skills and techniques with the machinery to make a necklace.

On a Sunday morning, we like to go to Article Cafe. You’ll always bump into friends there and then you might have a chat, and a chat will turn into potluck or a play-date for the kids, you never know. Then another craft thing we like to do is Susan, upstairs in Article Cafe, has a felt shop where she does felting workshops, and we like to make puppets with her.

Eva de Jong is a reporter for the Whanganui Chronicle covering health stories and general news. She began as a reporter in 2023.