Tag Archives: Silk ribbon embroidery

Hi everyone

Yesterday I called in to the Guild to catch up with the activities of the Creative and Paper Arts Groups. These two groups have decided to hold their activities on the same day with Creative in the morning and Paper Arts in the afternoon. They’re also co-ordinating the theme for the day and yesterday it was hearts.

You may want to get a long cool drink or a cuppa because this post is a bit of a marathon – there was so much going on. And even with all these photos I still only managed to get about 40 percent of the activity! What I didn’t capture was the laughter, chat, heads together playing with stitches and beads, comparing notes…….these two groups have really worked out how to mix serious technical learning and practice with fun company, lots of conversation and shared experience.

Beaded Stitches

The technique explored by the Creative Group was beaded stitches and the idea was to learn about the technique and then create a beaded heart or use it to embellish some other piece of stitching. By way of background members were encouraged to look at the beaded stitches that Sharon Boggon is featuring on her Pintangle blog.

Annette Dziedzic led the session and shared her knowledge about beaded stitches and had a wide range of books from the library spread out on tables as reference material. Some of the new books were getting people excited about the creative possibilities.

Sharon Boggon added lots of really useful tips and showed the various kinds of tools that were available including some tiny needles.

Then the fun part – looking at what everyone was doing – here’s a selection of photos taken with my iPad. Don’t forget to click on the photos if you want to get a more detailed look.

Sharon Boggon was working on this contemporary piece featuring a textured surface:

Here’s a closer look:

I also took a sneak peek at some other pieces that she had on the table:

….and again a closer look:

and look what else was hiding under some fabric – this exquisite contemporary whitework:

Dorothy Rudling was stitching away with her usual flair. There were these vibrant beaded  flowers:

and this heart was in progress:

Christine Bailey was experimenting with stitches and beads on this crazy quilt block:

I thought these panels of flowers in different styles were very effective – what do you think?

Fran Novitski was also adding to her crazy quilt blocks:

Ditto Pat Bootland:

The compositional elements of crazy quilting are quite fascinating and it’s really interesting to see how different individuals balance and emphasise colour, shape and embellishment.

Not far away Jillian Bath was using Beaded Shell Chain Stitch which she’d researched on TAST 97 and 98 the night before. She was using bugle beads and varying the length of stitches to see what effect it had:

Beside her Pearl Moysenko was starting these delicate beaded flowers:

Meanwhile Louise Willey was developing the foundation stitching for a wallhanging that’s going to include heirloom pieces from her family.

And Helen Hardie was stitching beaded flowers on sequin waste:

Jan Hure was adding a section of embroidery to her piece from a 2013 Creative Group session on entrapment:

Working out all the objects entrapped between the layers of fabric is quite a challenge!

Jan had brought along some examples of beaded work she’d done to share with everyone. There was this elegant scissorskeep:

Do you remember that here in October last year there was a post full of eye candy from an etui that Pat Bootland had designed and created? Well Jan has created one too. If you haven’t seen the earlier post an etui is a small ornamental box for holding embroidery tools like needles, thimbles etc.

Here it is all folded up:

Here are the four sides:

Ande here’s the etui opened out:

Awesome non?

Now to share the love on this very special and beautiful crazy quilt stitched by Annette Dziedzic to celebrate six generations of women in her family:

Here’s her daughter Anna who has embroidered some of the detail on this block:

This is our Annette at 18:

Annette’s Mum – part of this block is a piece of vintage enbroidery stitched by Olive:

And these are the three older generations of the family – the baby in this photo is Annette’s Mum:

Very moving and a really engaging way to show family history and tell a story.

I could have run away with these two notebooks. This one is a design by Joyce Weeks:

and this purple cutie belongs to Pearl Moyseyenko:

Paper Arts Group

I stayed just for the beginning of this session when Suzanne Clarke and Patricia Flower were demonstrating how to use scrumbled tissue to create a heart. They’ve also recommended that everyone keep a journal over the year to record their experiences in this group.

Here are a couple of journal pages Suzanne had prepared:

Isn’t that sumptuous beadwork just the business?

And here is Patricia’s colourful start to her journal – it gives a real sense of energy and sparkiness:

Enjoy!