A bit of bling

Just keeping up with these tags is a challenge! This week's involved a bit of bling and because I forgot, last week's brooches.

As far as brooches are concerned Claire and I have been working on some ideas for brooches to sell as little kits at Yarndale; if you want a sneaky peak there are two free tutorials in links on the Resources tab that go with our kits. As we are now an independent stitch group and our funds from our old branch were 'acquired' by Embroiderers' Guild head office we are a bit short in the funds department (let's not get into the ins and outs of HO gathering branch monies), so we decided a bit of fund raising was in order. Yarndale will be our first outing and we will have the brooch kits, a little fabric book kit and some big lucky dip bundles of fabric and trimmings on sale - more details to follow. There will be more free tutorials in our Resources to give some ideas; we hope you'll all take advantage of them.

Scissors!

We had a lovely meeting today - more of that in a later post. During the meeting I had an interesting chat with Christine, one of our members, about scissors. Now, I was very remiss and didn't get a photo - too busy chatting, but she had a lovely little box... In this box she had a pair of handmade scissors and a 1921 shilling with a magnet attached for pins and needles; there was also a needle case that fitted across the top of the box. 

It was so lovely and I learnt that her scissors were from the Ernest Wright Company in Sheffield. Ernest Wright were established in 1902 and are a small company dedicated to making handmade scissors and shears. It's great that a skilled craft such as this is still going in the world of mass produced items. I would recommend you have a look at their website (link above), it makes for an interesting read and if you are so inclined you can order scissors - but there's a waiting list! I spent a happy half an hour mooching around the site learning all about their history and products. Have a look!

Ernest Wright 1880-1954

That's a BIG pair of scissors!

Freebies, Stitch Alongs and Craft Alongs

There are some interesting things to be found on the internet for stitchers! I may have already mentioned this on our old blog but during lockdown some of us have been doing Cathy Reavy's stitch wheel, following the weekly videos on YouTube; I need to catch up, I'm a couple of weeks behind. Then there's the fabulous Anne Brooke with her various challenges, currently the 52 tags series. These are all free and I for one have enjoyed them very much and look forward to the coming weeks with Anne. 

There's lots more photos on our Instagram of the tags we have been doing and there will be some of the wheel when we finish the final few stitches. Links above.

There are also some great freebies to be had out there too, where makers have generously shared patterns. There's something for everyone. Personally, I'm not a great one for cross stitch but I have to say I'm rather taken with these two little projects which can be found here along with lots of other craft projects on the 'gathered.' website.

Last but not least in this mini roundup is Frill and Flounce; the link is to the FaceBook page but I'm sure you can Google it. They have some free Zoom workshops in their events information. I have done a couple of the bookbinding courses which have been great. Have a rummage round and see what you can find!