Staying Playful
QD #91 🛝 A day retreat in London this June
In this weeks edition…
✷ Update: Release Day 2026
✷ Event: We are hosting our first day retreat, in London!
✷ Article: Playing Out Loud can change your life
✷ Take our reader survey and shape the future of this newsletter
Dear Questers,
Sam here 👋 I hope this newsletter finds you playful! If not… I may have just the thing to change that.
Everything is full steam ahead in our Questy world right now!
🎆 Release Day 2026
This years edition, in partnership with CreativeMornings and Adobe, is gathering quite a pace! At the time of writing 1700 people have pledged that they will release a creative project on May 29th. Got a creative project you’ve been procrastinating on? Release Day is calling! It’s three weeks until our collective deadline.
🛝 Stay Playful: a day of play with Creative Quests
We are hosting our first day retreat, in London! The start of more IRL Creative Quests gatherings.
🗓️ Sat 20th June
⏰ 9.30am - 5.00pm
📍 Kindred, London
£50 inc a communal lunch
Join Sam Furness, founder of Creative Quests, for a day of creative exploration, genuine connection, and rediscovering wonder in the everyday. Through playful activities, an exploratory walk through Hammersmith, and open conversation, you will explore what play means to you and how to make more space for it in your life.
Hosted at the gorgeous Kindred, in Hammersmith - a space for community to connect face to face, with no one feeling excluded. They believe that people do better when connected with others, and so do we!
This event is part of a collection of thoughtful, in-person experiences that Kindred are hosting, designed to bring people together and foster a sense of belonging. Aligned with the national Loneliness Awareness Week campaign by the Marmalade Trust, the campaign encourages more open conversations around loneliness while creating space for meaningful relationships and shared experiences.
What to expect
In true Creative Quests spirit - this is not about switching off from the world. It is about engaging with it differently.
Using Kindred as our base, we will head out into Hammersmith to explore, gather inspiration, and treat the city as our creative playground. Along the way, you will take part in a mix of guided and self led activities designed to spark curiosity and shift perspective.
Together, we will experiment, enjoy a communal lunch, and make things inspired by what we discover.
🎟️ Come and join us on Sat 20th June!
📣 Playing Out Loud can change your life and banish your procrastination. It did mine.
If you are feeling deeply stuck on a long term project, this one’s for you.
The answer likely isn’t in working harder, but taking a playful detour.
Six years ago, on the eve of my 31st birthday, the UK went into a nationwide lockdown. (Don’t worry, this isn’t turning into a pandemic reflection piece.)
Birthday plans, project plans, any plans in fact - all went up in a cloud of smoke.
It looked as if my birthday was destined to be spent inside my house, video calling friends and family to receive birthday wishes and talk about how ‘unprecedented’ this moment in time was.
That was until, I felt something stir in me.
A playful questioning.
What if my lockdown birthday was the most connected I had ever felt on a birthday? What if I celebrated my birthday with all my friends - but none of them were invited?
After a quick photoshop session - I published this invitation on my Instagram and Twitter:
To attend my solo birthday party: people could send me a challenge to fulfil in my house. It could be as imaginative, weird or sentimental as they liked - what mattered was that they had thought about it.
By my birthday morning I had 60 playful challenges to complete in my house - all neatly organised in a google doc.
I spent all day hanging out in the imaginations of my friends and family (and a couple of random people from the internet). Everything from: ‘wear all your clothes at once’, ‘create an art installation about lockdown’ and ‘Do something impressive in reverse’
I completed the final challenge, ‘write a letter to your 35 year old self’', at 1am. Exhausted and elated in equal measure.
It was without doubt, one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.
If you really want - you can watch how the whole day folded out right here.
In the week following, I had conversations with various friends who all said the same thing: this is one of the best things I’ve ever seen you do. It should be a thing!
I couldn’t help but feel a deep irony. I had been endlessly iterating on how to launch Creative Quests for about 3 years at this point… yet this silly day of play was what captured people’s imaginations.
I decided it was a worthy a detour.
And so, Playing House, was born.
Every weekend for three months in lockdown I published ‘10 creative challenges to turn your house in a playground’. A way to reclaim weekends as a time for play, exploration and connection in a time where all those things were in short supply.
The aim was simply to Stay Playful, which has become somewhat of an M.O in my life, full stop.
Staying playful got me, and a fair few other people, through those first few months of the pandemic that were so wracked with uncertainty.
The act of routinely playing out loud unlocked a confidence I hadn’t felt in years. It reminded me how creative I was.
Short, energetic, challenge-focused play days lit up the same part of my brain that finishing a project felt like. Dare I say… it felt even better?
Time wise, the risk was so low. The only risk was feeling silly. The reward was having completed something, putting ideas out there, connecting with others who were also Playing House every weekend.
You can download a free PDF of the 100 playful challenges I did at home in 2020.
Fast forward to June 2020 and I ran a live version of Playing House through CreativeMornings virtual FieldTrips. 300 people showed up and played out loud together for 90 minutes - making hats from household materials, writing postcards from other planets and imagining their worlds through different lenses.
The amount of positive energy I got from this globally connective encounter gave me the confidence and inspiration to push through three years of procrastination and finally launch Creative Quests.
When we Play Out Loud, people recognise our bravery. It’s a way to send a positive signal to the world. Play helps us connect, create, and feel more alive. When life feels heavy, play brings lightness, energy, and new possibilities.
In the present day, our current Release Day campaign is partnered with CreativeMornings - and sponsored by Adobe (our largest partnership to date).
This can all be traced back to making a commitment to Stay Playful and invite others to do the same.
Playing out loud changed my life. It can change yours too.
Finally…
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:
✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off in July
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one
❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.
Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ
🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness
