Sunday 17 March 2024

 Members day making flowers - March 16th

We had a lovely day yesterday making flowers for the St Benedict Church, Wombourne flower festival in June.

Techniques included were wet felting, silk tulips, lutrador, machine stitching on dissolvable film and Kanzashi folded flowers.

Our members Lorraine, Mandy, Margaret, Ruth and Una ran the various 'stations' and a big thank you to them.

Here are some of the flowers that we made












I think the display will be fabulous when they are all put into arrangements

Saturday 9 March 2024

Angie Hughes - Stitch Glimpses

 Angie started by taking us back down memory lane, talking about how she worked for John Nash, Interior Designer, then discovering City & Guilds in Malvern, where she surprised herself being able to create, especially with machine embroidery.

She won the Charles Henry prize which led to her having an article in Embroidery magazine. She has been inspired by many things, including poetry and words in general, and in particular The Ledbury Rap by the poet Mark, as well as other poets and poetry.

Here are some examples of her work, using collage and words.







We look forward to our workshop with Angie, where collage, lettering, paper and fabric will all be used in our work. She suggested that we choose a picture, turn it over for a few days, then when we look at the image again and write the words quickly that come to mind, using these as our focus for our work.










Tuesday 20 February 2024

Jennifer Collier - Paper Dresses Workshop

Jennifer Collier - Paper Dresses Workshop

A lovely day was had by all, with a very big thank you to Jennifer, for her enthusiasm, skill and help throughout the day. 



Jennifer's practical demonstrations were clear and instructive.

Her examples gave us all lots of differing inspirations to construct our own dress.
Our finished and semi-finished dresses, all very different - all very lovely and inspiring.

We were shown how to stitch paper, make pockets, bindings, buttons and other embellishments to make our dresses personal to us.




  Fronts and Backs too


We brought some of our own papers and Jennifer was very generous with buttons, bags of interesting papers to use, as well as many templates for the collars, pockets, and other embellishments.

Jennifer can be found at Unit 12 and we hope to see her back again soon.

Tuesday 6 February 2024

Teresinha Roberts - Silk Road to Birmingham


Teresinha gave us a fascinating insight into the world of silk and her journal with this beautiful material. Teresinha told us a little about her own life from Brazil, via Malawi to the UK and how caterpillars have played a big part in her life.

She now has Mulberry trees on her allotment to produce her own silk and explained how silk is very different from other fibres, in that it has long fibres which allows the drape in silk garments. It is a very tough material in spite of its delicate appearance and has been used for fishing nets, medical procedures as it is non-allergic, as well as the cross hairs on microscopes!

Silk is extruded not grown, unlike other fibres has no cellular structure which is why is is has long fibres and the reason it is shiny is because of its prism type shape, which reflects the light.

The oldest piece of silk that we know of is 5,500 years old, which is staggering and it is thought to have been a baby's cloth.  

There are different types of silk, depending on whether the silk is reeled or spun and there are 100+ types of silk worm, such as Tussah and these are bigger than Mulberry worms and feed on Oak leaves.

Teresinha has a lovely way of speaking and has other talks on Wild Fibres and I am sure we will be inviting her back very soon. Her website is www.Wildfibres.co.uk























Sunday 21 January 2024

 January 20th In the hoop - Stephanie Redfern

Stephanie taught a workshop yesterday, using an embroidery hoop as the 'frame' for our work .

She initially showed us examples of her work

 









She then showed us how she uses a simple image and develops it 


We then set to and created our own pieces. Some of us got further than others!


























 


Wednesday 10 January 2024

 January 6th Narrative Textiles - Vivienne Beaumont

The first lecture of 2024 was a fascinating talk by Vivienne Beaumont

After doing her City and Guilds at Westhope College she went on to teach art , textiles and ceramics.

Vivienne then started an MA before lockdown. She needed to find a narrative for her work by using 50 words, 50 images and studying 4 artists

Her backgrounds start with acrylic mono prints. ink on top and then machine stitching, Texture is acheived with using the tailor tacking foot on her machine. She also uses abaca fibre  to create texture

She has an old Irish sewing machine which she has permanently set up with gold thread. as she likes harvest colours the gold enhances it. She has also used twigs and thorns.

As you can see she doesn't always stick to the inside of a frame or to a regular rectangular shape











Vivienne won a competition with ACE arts and the prize was to hold a solo exhibition, which she held last year entitled Seeds, flower and flowing hair

Thank you for a fascinating talk Vivienne



 Member's Christmas workshop 2nd December

Almost 30 of our members gathered together on December 2nd to have our Annual Christmas workshop and party.

Each member made a decoration of their choice and then swapped their decoration with another member at the end of the day.

We also had a bring and share lunch - magnificent as usual!!

The day was lovely although the weather cut short the day

Here are the decorations before our members took them away