Author: Jane - Page 10 - Southdowns Creative Stitchers

Welcome!

Sue Bush, Rust. Inspired by work for one of the Travelling Scrapbooks.

Welcome to the new website for ‘Southdowns Creative Stitchers’. We are really excited that the new group has been established, and you will be hearing from our Chair and Membership Secretary very soon with more information. We are very pleased to have got this far.

None of us expected the Embroiderers Guild to pull the plug on local branches so suddenly, especially during lockdown. We decided to approach it as an opportunity. Starting up a new group whilst ‘keeping the show on the road’ has been…well, let’s just say: ‘interesting’. It’s a bit like keeping the car driving along the motorway whilst some people replace the engine, some people change the wheels, and others operate the accelerator, brakes, clutch etc. At the same time, Rose (Chair) and Sue (Secretary) have managed to keep their hands on the steering wheel and their eyes on the road. Somehow, miraculously, we have managed not to career into a ditch!

After a month or so with our heads buried in legal matters, constitutions, finance, planning etc, we are now a fully constituted, officially existing new group. If you are interested in our new legal status, we opted to become an ‘Unincorporated Association’. This means we are answerable to our members and our constitution and no-one else. If you would like to read our new constitution it will be sent out, and will be put on the website soon.

Members of the former WTEG will be hearing from Rose our Chair soon with more information about what we have got planned, and from Betty our membership secretary about how to join.

We plan to keep our roots firmly in the traditions that have served us well for over 40 years. Don’t worry, we won’t be throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Having said that, alongside our traditional activities we also plan to introduce a new sub-group with a focus on contemporary textile art and mixed media. We feel that one of our strengths is the diversity of interests across the group, and we plan to build on that.

We’re looking forward to welcoming back old friends well as new members.

Subscribers list

If you receive an email link to this news post, this is because you were previously a ‘subscriber’ to the Worthing Tuesday Embroiderers Guild website. We have now transferred to this new website: you don’t need to do anything to continue to subscribe, or you can unsubscribe at any time. We didn’t introduce automatic emails to subscribers on the old website, but we have introduced it on the new one. This means that you should automatically be sent an email to alert you whenever a news post is added.

If you haven’t subscribed but would like to, scroll down to the very bottom of the ‘Home’ page, add your name and email address and click ‘subscribe’. When you receive an initial email response, you will need to confirm for it to be activated.

South East Regional Day

The South East Regional Day will be on the 11th July. See details in the poster.

Hearts

The Thursday Workshop group have been busy. They have made 200 hearts for the breast cancer unit at Worthing hospital. Here’s a photo of the group and some of the hearts. It already looks like a lot of hearts when you look at the table…but there are as many again in the bags on the floor!

‘From shoeboxes to bowls’

When Gill Denyer came to talk to the branch, she brought a very wide range of her work with her to illustrate her talk. Like many of us, Gill started her textile journey in the 70’s, when ‘home-made’ was the norm and was driven by thrift. Gill always enjoyed making things, and she showed us photos of her 70’s dyed sheets and home-made dungarees. The ‘shoeboxes’ in the title refer to the rooms she used to make out of decorated shoeboxes, complete with matchbox chests of drawers etc.

Textiles were part of the ‘background’ to Gill’s life for many years, alongside her training as a biologist, and her marriage and raising a family. Making children’s clothes was a pleasure. Her family always went in for fancy dress in a big way and she was called on to make wonderful fancy dress outfits. She worked for some years as a dinner lady and then a teaching assistant, while carrying on with her own textile work at home. She did some patchwork and quilting, but felt that hand-stitching was not her main interest. A change of job to textile technician introduced her to the work that A Level Texile Art students were doing, and she decided that she wanted to do something similar. Gill then signed up for a machine embroidery city and guilds course with Pam Watts. This started her on her new textile journey. She experimented with all sorts of materials and techniques, and particularly enjoyed using textured surfaces such as tyvek. She also discovered stitching on dyed ‘silk caps’ which led her to creating machine-stitched bowls. She brought a big collection of bowls with her, a few of which are shown at the end of this post (click to enlarge).

The machine embroidery course closed before Gill could carry on from the Certificate to the Diploma, so she began to go on other workshops and to study the work of other textile artists so that she could carry on learning. One example is the work of Susan Lenz (whose permission was given for this work to be shown by Gill in her talks). Gill started making items to sell, for example brooches, sculptures and books. She joined the textile group ‘Totties’ which stands for ‘Textiles on Tuesdays’ in Guildford, and she developed more skills such as printing and dyeing. More recently she joined the well-known textile group ‘Wey Valley Workshop’ and will exhibit with them in June 2020. Below are some examples of her popular machine-embroidered bowls.

‘Up the Garden Path’ Exhibition

Here are details of an exhibition that members might be interested in.

Christmas meeting, and the ‘Take Two’ Challenge

There was a great turn-out for the Christmas meeting, and it was a lovely afternoon of chat, stitch and cake. Highlight of the afternoon was viewing the results of the ‘Take Two’ challenge (reminder: the challenge was to stitch a piece to be presented on a pre-set canvas size, using only two colours). There was a grand total of 43 entries, and everyone was impressed by the variety and quality of the work. Entries included a wide range of modern, traditional, hand-stitch, machine-stitch etc., and it really reminded us all what a varied group of stitchers we are. The £1 per vote charge raised £76 for the Air Ambulance.

Here are a few of the entries, with people studying them and trying to decide which to vote for. You can see the winning entries below that. At a later date, I’ll put up an image of each entry – that will take a little longer, so I wanted to get the winning ones up sooner rather than later.

Summer-School ‘show and tell’.

The 2019 AGM went very smoothly. Anne Turner gave an account of an active and happy year stitching, and described the wide range of talks and workshops that take place each month. The Treasurer’s report showed a stable and healthy situation; and willing volunteers came forward to replace the three committee members who were stepping down. Thanks were given to outgoing committee members Alison Crossthwaite, Carole Dengate (outgoing Secretary) and to Anne Turner for her 3 years as our chair.

Participants in the Regional summer-school showed other members some of the diverse work that was produced during the 3-day gathering. Branch members took part in two different workshops – a stitch and dye group with Ruth Issett, and a print and stitch group with Faye Maxwell. It was a good opportunity to get to know fellow branch members a bit better, as well as members from other parts of the region, and to get absorbed in our different activities.

An eager group hanging on Ruth’s words of wisdom.

Maria kicked off with a description of the lovely environment at the training centre at Roffey Park, and the excellent facilities and high level of teaching (and yummy food).

Maria introduced the stitch and dye technique that was taught in Ruth Issett’s group. Initial stitching was done in white fabrics and threads, which were then dyed afterwards with procion dye, leading to a surprise each time when the colours were applied.

Caroline showed samples that illustrate the technique, where she had cut the sample in half before dyeing and left one half un-dyed. This was a useful record, since other pieces were dyed after stitching so the only record of the ‘white’ stage is in photographs. Other examples below show pieces before and after dyeing.

The piece by Maria (below) was based on a sunset. It shows the different stages: before dyeing: dyed but not rinsed: rinsed, and finally framed.

Other branch members went to the workshop with Faye Maxwell, who was a popular tutor at the summer school the year before. Their work started with a choice of printing blocks, which were printed onto plain fabric before being embellished with stitch.