August Exhibitions

No meetings in August. First Branch Meeting in September is the Branch AGM

Two exhibitions during August for you to visit if you are in the Lytham St Annes Area.

The first one is Blackpool Art Society at the Gallery at Booths Supermarket. Members of Blackpool Branch of the Embroiderers’ Guild are also members of the Art Society and as such will be exhibiting some of their work too.

The second exhibition is a joint two and a half day exhibition at the Assembly Rooms. This is the first time that Blackpool and Lytham St Annes Branch of the Embroiderers’ Guild have joined together to exhibit their work. (Actually that is not strictly true we did put on a joint one day exhibition at the North West Regional Day in April but that was a members only day). This one is for the public.

July 2011

Our first meeting in July was our annual Strawberry Fair. This year we invited Wyn Ingham as our guest. Wyn has been setting us some challenges this year and we thought it would be nice to meet her, for her to meet us and for her to see how we had got on with the challenges. Wyn is an absolute delight. If she lived any nearer we would have to ‘press gang’ her into becoming one of our members. She made some really lovely complimentary and constructive comments about our pieces and then set us our next challenge.

The first challenge was a ‘ring wrap’ ( for a ring box) in the style of Faberge or Cloisonné. These were fun and once we had set a deadline for them and presented them at one of our meetings so see how we were all progressing we then moved on to our second challenge of making a ‘book wrap/ cover’. This was to reflect the contents of the book. As the branch chairman I was delighted that we had such a nice selection and variation to show to Wyn when she came. My thanks also to Seonaid, our Programme Secretary, for organising the challenges with Wyn.

Some of the book covers are work in progress.

You have seen the ring wraps already but as they were out on show for Wyn and I had to photograph them again – you might as well have another look at them!

The Strawberry tea was a really successful evening. It was well attended and there was a lovely spread of edible goodies. My thanks to everyone involved in making the evening such a success and to all those who attended.

Our second meeting in July was with Norma Hopkins and Terri Jones. They are both members of Textile 21. Norma was the main speaker and Terri also made a contribution to the evening. They were able to describe several approaches to designing and showed some examples of their work using the digital projector and samples for us to look at afterwards.

You can read more about Norma and Terri at this link
http://www.textilearts.net/tutors/norma_terri/index.php

June 2011

At the beginning of June we had a workshop with Linda Westerman on 3D images. Although the workshop was poorly attended it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. Linda has a lot of patience and is an inspiring teacher. We all did something quite different to each other as I sure these images will illustrate.

          
    
          

                    
         

         

Our practical evening was insertion stitches. Seonaid had set up some cards ready and a sheet of instructions for us to work on this technique. We didn’t get going on them straight away as we had a lot to discuss re- forthcoming exhibitions (more of these in future posts).

Our speaker in June was Hilary Nagashi. She took us on a journey around Iran using a digital projector. She brought some lovely examples of embroidery to show us and really gave us a good insight into her life as a member of an Iranian family.

We thoroughly enjoyed Hilary’s talk and drooled over the amazing collection of embroidered items that she brought with her.  Sadly I didn’t have my camera with me so I don’t have any photographs to show.

May 2011

In May our speaker was Sue Lancaster. Sadly I missed the meeting as I was away on holiday in Scotland. I have it on good authority that evening went well and that Sue was very interesting.  You can read more about Sue at this link.

http://www.stitchedupandfleeced.com/index.html

There was no second meeting in may as it was Bank Holiday.

April 2011 and Regional Day!

The month started with a Saturday Open Day. Unfortunately with all the preparations for Regional Day we omitted to advertise this event so we had very few members attending.  However that did not stop us from enjoying the day.

Marge brought an array of braiding materials and examples, small kits and instructions. We had the embellisher available for anyone to try out and also the latest acquisition to our branch equipment – the Ashford Knitters’ Loom. 

    
    Seonaid going great guns on the ‘Knitters’ Loom.

   
Marge’s Braiding equipment.  She also had a lot of information with her in a box of files.

 
Experimenting with the Embellisher and some embellished samples.

             
A couple of drop spindles. The largest one is a Navajo Spindle.

 

REGIONAL DAY – APRIL 16th!!!  Finally it arrived.
Actually in all kicked off on the Friday from about 4pm onwards as we entered the building and began setting things out in readiness for the BIG DAY!!

The day all went to plan and from the comments that we received afterwards and as members left at the end of the day a good time had been had by all.  We were joint hosts of the event with Lytham St Annes Branch.  The following images are of the pieces from the joint exhibition.  I am not including the competition entries as there are too many people belonging to other branches around the regions whose permission I might need first in order to show their work.    

                
                
                
                
                
                
                
               

The organising committee all went out for a well deserved meal that evening.   It was so nice to be able to relax knowing that the day had been a success and it was all over!!!

March 2011

The March practical evening was ‘Canvas Stitches’ .  Seonaid had gone to a lot of trouble to paint small pieces of canvas and to bring threads and interesting embellishments to add to the pieces of work. She had also provided an instruction sheet on Norwich Stitch.  Another successful evening with everyone ‘beavering’ away.

The first 3 months of this year also meant that we spent a fair bit of time in each of our meetings with reminders about the preparations for Regional Day – now only 1 month away!!!

The speaker in March was Barbara Howell talking about ‘Using Photos as a Design Source’. I missed the talk as I was on holiday in the Lake District but I believe it was an interesting evening.

You can find out more about Barbara using this link http://www.barbarahowell.co.uk/

February 2011

Our workshop was on machine embroidered brooches led by yours truly!

Everyone worked really hard and produced some lovely brooches.

making the material.

working the edge

time to embellish

The end result – a successful workshop!!

The try it out session in March was on Tyvek and other heatable plastics. There were quite a examples brought in by members and a lot of interest in ‘having a go’ with a heat gun and using the iron.

It was also our hand-in evening for our 'ring box wraps'. This was the first of our challenges from Wyn Ingham.

It was great to see such a good response. The ring boxes had to be inspired either by Fabergé or Cloisonné.

            
           
        
                   

At our second meeting we were visited by Becky Waite who talked to us about ‘Working in Blackpool and other Things’ She works in recycled plastic and brought some interesting pieces for us to handle and inspect closely and a PowerPoint presentation of her work. Sadly she had to leave early to catch a train back home so we didn’t really get chance to ask her too much about her work.

You can take a look at Becky’s work here. http://beckywaite.synthasite.com/