Monday 25 July 2016

Regional Summer School

The first warm weekend of the summer and we were all heading towards Bishop Burton to shut ourselves away to embroider.  I joined Val, Moira and Christina on the Libby Smith workshop 'Rolling Landscapes' and we were quickly underway dyeing small strips of fabric to make our landscapes.  It was a bit tricky rinsing them out in the tiny washbasins in our bedroom en-suites but we all seemed to manage without painting the walls as well.

Saturday was spent layering up our landscape and starting to stitch.  The day was interspersed with trips to the canteen to feed the body and walks round the gardens to feed the mind.  As usual, the food was excellent and there was plenty of it.  It is always good to meet members from other branches and to chat as well as work.  Sunday after lunch we did a final trip round each others classrooms to look at the work done and it was all beautiful.  Maggie Smith's group had been doing tiny flowers and trees in the most delicate of stitching, Pippa Foulds group had also been doing fine stitch work using the white on white technique of Mountmellick embroidery.  Jan Dowson's group made some lovely patched works using antique fabrics and ephemera to produce lovely memory pieces.

Here are some photographs of the work done on Libby's workshop.



This lady finished hers in the weekend.  Wisely she made it very narrow and not too long so that she didn't have quite as much stitching to do as the rest of us.





This is the tutors work.  You can see it better on her website. They are beautifully detailed with paint and stitch.

This is the finished one rolled up.