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.