Merry Christmas!

🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 🎄🎄🎄 

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Today we had our annual Jacob's Join lunch - lovely as usual; of particular note was Sue's fruit cake with no eggs, sugar or butter! It was delicious especially with some cheese. 

We had our Christmas card swap and a round up of things to come next year: our raffle will be monthly prompts based on famous paintings and we will also be launching a new round of Travelling Pages, the monthly prompt will be the raffle painting, so that should prove interesting. Also on the cards is a little series of posts on here and our other social media featuring members' favourite stitches or techniques. We have a packed programme for 2024, so if you fancy joining us, drop us an email.

We had a display of items made on workshops this last 12 months, all of which have featured on the blog and in addition there were sketch books of techniques from Gail's sessions introducing those fairly new to stitching to various stitches and traditions, and also a couple of mini quilted hangings from Anne Brooke's stitching hour. Lots of photos below in no particular order. I'm off to make Sue's cake!

    

                                                 

...and last but not least, Serena's hat!

Deb Cooper Workshop

Wow, what a day we've had! Deb Cooper came and ran a workshop for us: Lines and Edges with some dyeing with rust and tea thrown in for good measure. Deb brought us some really lovely samples to inspire us and lots of bits and bobs to include in our strips. Scraps of fabric were applied to a backing strip and stitched with various fabrics and papers with a selection of stitches. We used neutral colours ready to dye later. As we were stitching Deb produced a lucky dip of little pieces of paper each with an instruction of something to include as we stitched - a new stitch, a named stitch, lace, a different fabric etc - just to keep us on our toes! We also used lolly sticks and bobbins. 

Deb's work:

And ours in progress:

Some of our strips or bundles of scraps were tea and rust dyed - tightly rolled to make 'spring rolls' and 'dimsum' - now their official name. We are waiting for our chinese starters to sit for a week and then dry before we see the results.