Activities This Week

Our branch of the Embroiderers' Guild will be hosting the South West Region AGM in October and we are asking our members to make small pieces of embroidery to be mounted onto card and presented as calendar gifts to the visitors from other branches.  I volunteered to stitch/make five and have completed them and laced them onto the card........ 

There has also been some more work on the embellished piece. I've removed the 'beginnings' of a tree, stitched automatic machine patterns onto the background, trying to find stitches that look like leaves, ferns, bamboo etc. Then I've added a tiger from a digitized pattern on the Pfaff and finished off with some more embellising of fibres, threads and wool. He'll look better once framed and will need a double mount - title Endangered, Extinct.

 

Gold work, Embellisher and Spring!

Some of the bits and pieces I've been working on over the past few weeks/days. In January our branch of the Embroiderers' Guild had a workshop on gold work ..... but I was unwell and missed it; but, once feeling better, I started some myself and based the design on a stained glass window from the cathedral in Reims, France. This was a design project I did for my City & Guilds and it's been invaluable; I keep going back to it.

Blue Window - unfinished!

 This past Monday at West Country Embroiderers' we did another gold work workshop led by Llinos Spriggs - she encouraged to use the centre as a focal point and gave us a few pointers to 'update' the technique.

Explosion!

I've also been lucky enough t0 get myself a new embellishing machine - this one has 12 needles as opposed to the previous one which only had five.  Playing around with wool tops and fancy wool and also on the second one with pieces of torn polyester headscarves (all found in charity shops). Not sure about the second of the two; it's going to need a lot of machine and hand embroidery but it has potential.

Forest Floor

Tiger Jungle

It also looks like spring is coming to the village! ;-)

wild flowers

the lane into the village

my best boy! Woof!

 

Life's Ups and Downs

Been absent for a while ........... had two nasty falls; first time I fell over in the mud due to all the rain and flooding in Somerset. Second time, I fell over in the High Street of Yeovil, again because of the rain and slippery footpaths. Each time I had one leg out in front of me and the other bent up, under and sort of behind. Luckily the second time two young shop assistants came and helped me up. I was out shopping with my husband but he was in a different place to me when I fell; thank goodness for mobile phones. I could barely walk, would not of been able to drive home and couldn't bend the leg for a week. I got around with my trusty walking stick - must have sprained/strained/torn my thigh muscle. But very pleased to say I'm up and running again.

Life's ups - well I've treated myself to a new sewing machine - a Pfaff Creative Performance with the software and embroidery unit. This doesn't mean that I'll give up my normal sort of textile work, but it does open up new possibilities - my first efforts.