Thursday 14 June 2012

Guild Postcards



I have just been to Huddersfield to view the embroidered postcards and they are quite an amazing sight.  There are nearly 3000 of them and they are spread all over the theatre.  The ladies of Huddersfield Branch have done an amazing job to get them displayed, I believe it took them over 7 hours to do.  It was fun looking at the pictures and trying to work out which country they represented.  Some Branches had put in an amazing amount of research, Lincoln for instance, had Comoros (has anyone heard of it) and they produced 14 postcards about the island, plus a flag!  Some branches had worked a theme into their cards.  Horsham had produced all theirs in Kantha style to represent Bangladesh. The smocking branch had obviously done all theirs in smocking and produced one of my favourite pieces of a wave and a beach.  I have printed another of my favourites, a picture of the northern lights in Finland.  I was also taken with an Iguana from Swaziland but unfortunately he didn't photograph well.  If you look carefully you will see Ryedale's contribution in one of the photographs below.  The exhibition moves on to The Customs House, Mill Dam, South Shields from the 27th June to 11th July so if you can get to see it, it is worth the trip.

Saturday 2 June 2012

May Meeting

Sorry for the delay in reporting on the May Meeting but my internet has been down.  The line from the telegraph pole had rotted in the box at the top of the pole and an engineer had to come out and climb up and reconnect me.  Apparently, most of the engineers work these days is repairing old cable!

Back to last Satuday.  We had a good display of finished items from the mini workshop we did last month using transfoils, pictures below.  We have also put together a small display of members work for the exhibition at Ripley in July. It was worth taking the time to work out how many pieces of work were needed to make a good display.

 We received an offer of wood pincushion bases that needed sanding and varnishing before completing with fabric, embroidery, etc.  Members have agreed to buy them at £1.75 each, all proceeds going to fund the building of a school in Haiti.  For those who don't wish to keep their pincushion, we hope to sell them to raise a few more funds.

 We are also setting up a quilting team within the Branch to organise the making of a new bag for our banner.  The poor banner has been transported around for years in a bag made from curtain fabric which has now got sadly saggy.  To prevent any damage to the banner, which is made with thick card so that it can be mounted on a stand and therefore can be transported to all our exhibitions, we thought that a quilted bag would be the best option.  I have suggested that to make all the members a part of the project, we all bring in a piece of fabric to go into the chosen patterns.  I am now leaving this up to the team to get together next month and sort out a colour scheme and design, it's nice when you can offload all your bright ideas for someone else to sort!!!

We had a very good talk from Elizabeth Almond entitled 'Blackwork Journey - New Beginning, where she explained how she came to start stitching blackwork and where here design ideas come from.  She gave one or two good tips for beginners and experienced stitchers.