Christmas Social

 Today we had our Christmas Jacob's Join lunch which is always lovely and we exchanged handmade Christmas cards. We also had our new competition with prizes of £75 for 1st, £50 for 2nd and £25 for 3rd. Entries were voted on and the results were...

Margaret 1st with her absolutely stunning book depicting her garden:

2nd Sue I 

3rd Judith N

                                       

Teabags aren't just for a cuppa.

 Today Jackie led us in a mini workshop on teabag landscapes. Jackie is a real whizz with her left over teabags and has shown us her beautiful work using them many times. Well, we got to join in today. She has been saving Yorkshire teabags (what else?!) for a while, drying and preparing them for us to use. She brought inlets of little bits and pieces to create our miniature landscapes - bits of scrim, plumbers scrim(?!), evenweave fabrics and florist's ribbon; we got to delve into her ort tin of lacy scraps. Once we had selected pieces for out background, middle and foreground we stitched them down and then added embroidery. Everyone loved the results and they were all different. Don't throw you teabags away, turn them into mini works of art!

Some of Jackie's lovely work: 

And our mini art works:

Corinne Young: A Stitched Garden

 This afternoon we had Corinne Young visit us (click on the link for her website) to give us a talk about her textile journey and what fascinating journey it has been. There are lots of interesting articles on her website from various magazines and some fabulous pictures, but here's a quick summary of our afternoon.

Corinne started with studies at the RHS Lindley library and the Economic Botany collection at Kew producing work based on seed heads and botanical specimens using flax fibre to make paper for a background.

Following an exhibition at the Society of Designer Craftsmen she was approached by one of the producers of the Lord of the Rings theatre production and was commissioned to make sixteen panels. These were first exhibited in Toronto and then moved to the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Photo from Corinne's website

A commission for Burton Constable Hall was based on the theme of the passage of time where art work was displayed amongst existing antique pieces.

Photo from Corinne's website

Corinne now works on 3D pieces - machine embroidered flat, cut out and stiffened to turn onto amazingly realistic flowers and plants. 

Photo from Corinne's website

Corinne has exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show numerous times and I'm sure people must think her plants are real!

We had a lovely afternoon looking at Corinne's work and listening to her journey in stitch.

I snapped some photos of the work she brought but I'm afraid they don't do it justice.

We had a stitch morning before Corinne's talk and as usual there was a lot of lovely varied work by our members. We were particularly taken with Clare's pasty - a needle case in fact, which was a really clever idea.

Not a Cornish pasty

Cute!

Bee-utiful (apologies!)

Can you spot Serena's hidden message?