It was a dark and stormy day, the rain came down in torrents .......
There was no old man to tell us a tale but our morning was brighten by a visiting tutor, Angela Oswald, an amazing stitcher and teacher. We enjoyed Angela's last visit to us for a Boro talk and workshop, but this time her theme was 'circles'. These were some of her samples and works in progress.
For additional inspiration, Angela also showed us photos of circle-based work from artists using a variety of different media.
After brief discussions about backgrounds and stitches, we all started on our individual pieces, whether they were small patches, woven backgrounds or larger pieces. As usual, Angela was generous with her time and supportive comments and ideas. We all made a good start but were nowhere near completing anything before our two hours were over.
Thank you, Angela, for a lovely workshop that will keep us stitching well into the winter!
Our afternoon speaker was Kirsteen McGregor, whose work as a pattern cutter in the children's clothing sector led her to a commitment to UK manufacturing and natural fibres. She spoke about 'Homegrown Homespun', a regenerative fashion project which aimed to re-introduce flax-growing and linen production, from its start in 2021 to this year. Kirsty told about the whole process from clearing the waste land in the centre of Blackburn (300 bags of rubbish!) to the processing of the final harvest in 2024, which had to be done in Poland as there are no commercial processors in the UK.
We watched a very informative video of the project and Kirsty gave us brief demos of how flax could be processed by hand (lots of time and good arm muscles), although the resulting fibres are too coarse for garments.
Thank you, Kirsty, was a really interesting talk. There's lots of info and photos online. In particular:
No comments:
Post a Comment