The Blackpool Cloak

In the midst of our usual round of meetings, stitching and workshops, some of us have been working on a very exciting project with the Grand Theatre.

The Grand in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company present a series of Shakespeare plays for schools aimed at 8 years and over "First Encounters with Shakespeare"

This year's play is The Tempest, and we have been asked to produce a Blackpool Cloak for Prospero to wear during the performances.  Children in local primary schools have been very involved in a programme of "Shanties, Shipwrecks and Spells" to discover our local coastal heritage. As a part of the programme we have visited Anchorshome  and St Kentigerns Primary schools to lead workshops with the children to make seaside themed embellishments for the cloak.

As usual our members have been very generous with donations of suitable fabrics

The children got quite excited when they saw all the sparkly stash they had to play with.

Many of the children were able to stitch and produced some lovely work, the younger children produced equally effective glued collages.

We were very impressed with the behaviour, enthusiasm and ideas  from all the children and we have a huge selection of  work to add to the cloak.

Construction is now well under way and the first performance is on the 28th February

Performances at the Grand are on 4th and 5th of February and tickets are available from the box office

The performance is especially tailored for children and is 90 minutes long so if you are free on those dates why not go along to watch what promises to be a fantastic production

Shabby Chic Tassels

Our February workshop was a lovely relaxing day of hand stitching. Ann guided us through making Shabby Chic hanging tassels.

As usual we had lots of lovely fabrics, beads and buttons to play with

And we all produced very different but equally satisfying results:

We decided the best way to display was on the coat pegs:

Inspirational Artists

As part of our stitch night programme this year we are going to focus on different artists and try to use their work as inspiration for new pieces of work.
Artist of the month for January is Picasso:

Variety of styles and mediums to choose from so lots of ideas - hopefully some of them will appear in our exhibition in April.

February is the turn of Kandinsky and Klee:

 Kandinsky

 Kandinsky

 Kandinsky

 Klee

Klee

As a collaborative piece of work we have chosen Kandinsky "Concentric Circles in a Square"

Each of us to make a square based on these colours and they will be joined together to make a larger artwork for the exhibition.