Summer School reminiscences

As we sit huddled against the November cold and damp outside, it's nice to think back to the summer and the really inspiring summer school we had with Linda Miller.  Although early August wasn't exactly blazing with sunshine, it has to be said that it was much warmer and brighter than it is just now!

Two whole days devoted to machine embroidery was a real treat, and I'm sure I can say that we all thoroughly enjoyed the sessions and learned a huge amount from Linda about creating little works of art on our machines.  Linda was extremely patient and always enthusiastic; she managed to see the positive points of some fairly wonky efforts (speaking for myself here), and showed us how to achieve a professional finish to our creations.

You can see from the photos below what a wide variety of subjects people chose to execute, and it's all credit to Linda that she managed to encourage everyone to be brave and go for it!

Linda (standing left) encourages us to 'show and tell' our finished or nearly-finished pieces

Judith Lovatt: 'What If?' talk and 'Compose and Distort Dayschool, 1 -2 November 2013

What a coincidence that Judith Lovatt came to talk to the Branch on Friday 1st November as both the feast of Diwali and Guy Fawkes were being celebrated!  As the fireworks were going off outside, she used the word “explosion” as she demonstrated ways of pushing the boundaries of drawing, design and embroidery in our work. 

The work shop on Saturday 2nd was fun and experiential. We were all working at various levels and Judith coped with all our diversities. She also gave us time to talk about our emerging samples of work with each other, which proved to be another learning experience.  See some examples of these below.

Judith is an excellent tutor and ran a very comfortable workshop.


Trial prints on fabric, using paints, inks, crayons and various techniques to create surface texture:

Woven paper collage designs:

Using photos of previously stitched work

A mix of images and crayon rubbings creates a very textured collage

An alternative way of combining images

A combination of two different street images gives an interesting view