Next meeting: 21st February Making Textile Beads

For next meeting, which is a practical one, please bring with you

• your sewing kit, 
• pieces of interesting fabric and paper ( they need to be long and thin as you will be rolling them up).
• thin cord /  ribbon suitable for "stringing" the beads int a necklace or bracelet.

Don't worry if you don't have any of these as we will bring equipment with us.

Liz and Ann

17th Jan Sheila Pearson Bags and Belts

Sheila with some of her lovely belts.

We were delighted to welcome Sheila Pearson, a local craftswoman, who regaled us with her personal journey from a passion to break free of childhood family constraints on her creativity to entering the  fashion world. This ultimately led to her amazing leather bags and belts business - none of us will ever look at a belt without an appreciation of the work that goes into them - especially Sheila's bespoke, ruched, works of artistic wonder.

Sheila explained about her unique way of achieving these leather embellishments.

A selection of bags made by weaving strips of leather and a belt - look closely for the ruching.

Christmas Party 13th Decmber

It was a very different Christmas party!

We brought ties and decorated them! Using all kinds of different techniques. Would we find someone to model them afterwards? With this must glitter and sequins it was anyone guess.

Thank you to the committee for arranging such a fun evening.  We all thought decorating a tie for Christmas a very novel idea.

Cas Holmes workshop Saturday 26th November

Cas Holmes is renowned for creating artistic wonders from recycled papers and found objects. Our workshop comprised of her showing us some of her techniques and us trying to use them to good effect! It was a tremendous day with lots of surprises and ideas for continued textile and paper experiments.  Cas also brought some of her own work for us to see.  You can discover more about Cas and her work on:  www.casholmes.textilearts.net

These pieces by Cas Holmes were inspired by her visit to the USA

Cas loves birds and often uses their images in her work

We worked on distressing papers and then tearing them in the manner of Momigami   -  a Japanese technique.  It was great fun  then adding paint and or wax crayon.  Here are some pictures of us hard at work. As you will see - we need to carry on working with the results of our day school at home. Hopefully we will all be able to bring our finished pieces to the meeting in the new year - so our New Years resolution is ......?

Concentration!

This is Fun !!

Work in progress

More work in progress

Had you thought of this?

work in progress

Janice Gunner - Shibori

Our November meeting was a wonderful exploration of the technique of Shibori, by Janice Gunner. Not only did she show us her own work, but also examples from artisans in Japan and Africa.  Janice has visited Japan and met with some of the best exponents of Shibori, the detail of which left us gasping with the intricacies and pains taking attention to detail.  We are most fortunate in that she is going to return to Liss in May next year to run a Shibori workshop. It is going to be a wonderful day!

Pennants on display at Gusto's Liss

Sue, Anne and I managed to put the pennants up. They look great, so why not go and have a look, and sample the wonderful food they serve.

October meeting

Jenny, Sue and Deirdre

The business of the AGM was conducted very swiftly. Our Chairman , Treasurer,  Secretary and Programme Secretary  were elected for another year, as were the committee members with two additional group members joining the committee. They  were unanimously  thanked for the tremendous hard work they have all done in the past year which has made the group the success it undoubtedly is.
Nineteen members  made pennants for the Olympics and everyone was invited to vote for their favourite piece.  There was an amazing selection of pennants - I am sure the recipients will be impressed with their unique souvenir from the 2012 London Games.
The Gold award went to Sue Organ with her beautiful Olympic Torch. Silver to Deirdre Mitchell and Bronze to Jenny Ashford.

Some of the pennants

More of the pennants

 

We then had an activity of making name  badges. Several group members came armed with the where-with-all for making name badges using different techniques.  I think the computerised sewing machine that stitched names automatically was a favourite!