Come as Strangers, Leave as Friends: Our Sip & Paint at Azure Lamara

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a room when twenty-five women are concentrating on something with their hands. It arrived about forty minutes into our first Sip & Paint morning at Azure Lamara, and it lasted almost a full minute before someone laughed and it broke.

We had put a sign at the door that morning: come as strangers, leave as friends. It is an easy thing to print and a harder thing to make happen. What makes it happen, it turns out, is giving women something to do with their hands. Nobody has to perform small talk when there is a blank clay tray in front of her and a decision to make about colour.

The trays went in every direction. One became a beach, all blue waves and gold sand with tiny shells pressed along the shore. Another filled with red and pink hearts around a single word: loved. Some women planned carefully and some just started, and by the end you could walk the tables and see twenty-five completely different imaginations laid out side by side.

Azure Lamara gave us a beautiful room to do it in — light through tall windows, a courtyard just outside, the kind of space that makes people slow down. The art kits came from The Creative Escape, and the dessert table, which we should admit disappeared faster than the paint dried, came from Dessert Parlour, with sweets from Iffah Dessert Studio and The Melt. Rawaj Wellness and Playful Hands filled the goodie bags that went home at the end.

What we did not expect was how many women came alone. Several told us afterwards that they had almost turned around in the car park. By the time we took the group photo, you could not tell who had arrived with a friend and who had arrived with nobody.

That is the whole point of what we are building. Not the trays, lovely as they are, but the fact that a woman can walk into a room in this city knowing no one and walk out with a group chat.

Our next gathering is being planned now — join the community on WhatsApp to hear about it first.