Favourite stitches: Double running stitch

 This is a the first in an occasional series of posts on the favourite stitches of some of our members. First up is Serena. We all love Serena's designs where she produces some intricate double cross stitch patterns, often with dates and hidden motifs. This is her design using another favourite: double running stitch. It looks like back stitch but is made differently. Learn how to do it with the RSN Stitch Bank.

Front

Back

Beyond Repair with Shelley Rhodes

 We had a lovely day with Shelley Rhodes today and a workshop called Beyond Repair. We were inspired by her gorgeous pieces of work and then we made a start. We gathered our bits of fabric and papers and attacked them... hole punched, awls, wire brushes , sandpaper, ripping and tearing; we were brave and set about previous pieces of work we weren't too impressed with and made holes and distressed everything. Next was adding paint and ink to hide and mask bits.

Here's our distressing in progress:

    

Then we arranged our distressed pieces, pinned bits, bonded and glued bits to hold them in place and then started adding stitch. We may then cut these pieces and continue the process. We had a great time and everyone went away with work to finish but also with ideas about how we might continue to fragment and repair those pieces until we finally have something we might consider finished. Everyone thought it was a really freeing process - highly recommended. Thanks Shelley.

Work in progress:

 

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. 

March meeting

 We had a super busy meeting today. We had PAT testing going on with sewing machines and various electrical bits and bobs for upcoming workshops. We had a bit of a catch up with the Skipton Castle project - hope one to our Instagram to see a sneaky peek of some of the squares so far.

Pauline led a mini workshop making cards based on Katrina Witten's work.

Gail was running her Techniques Notebook on Dorset buttons with a bit of a catch up on previous topics.

And then there was some general stitching.