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!

Eco dyeing

 Today we had a great talk from Diane Morgan about her adventures with eco-dyeing. Diane lives in Brittany and also brought lots of lovely French textiles for us too. She give us lots of really interesting and useful information about her process, from scouring and mordanting fabric to the the placement of leaves and botanicals; she also explained the use of an 'iron blanket'. To top it all shelf us with detailed instructions so we can all have a go.

Not content with dyeing her fabrics she also makes some beautiful books and labels with dyed paper. Claire and Sue did a turn on the catwalk with some clothes that had been dyed. Diane made a lovely cushion for us to raffle too, so we had a really enjoyable morning.

And of course there was the usual stitching

Sue had been on an Anne Brooke course