October Meeting

Going Crazy over Patchwork

Our morning started with an introduction to crazy patchwork from Jean, with some examples (some more organised than crazy!) provided by Joy and Lynda.

Members were soon hard at work putting together their own pieces using an incredible range of fabrics. Not enough time to finish is a two-hour morning session, but a good start. Thanks, Jean, hope you're going to monitor progress at future meetings!

Velvets, silks, prints, faux leather (!), a Hardangar sample..........anything goes when you're going crazy!

Our afternoon speaker was Gale Owen Crocker, Professor Emerita of the University of Manchester, formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. Gale has written and contributed to many books and research papers on the period. She specialised in interdisciplinary research and this was evident from her talk.

In a well-illustrated talk, Gale told us about gold embroidery, in what is now referred to as the Early Medieval period, starting with the re-discovery of the Maaseik embroideries in Belgium through to the 'St Cuthbert' maniple and stole in Durham, with interesting diversions into tablet-weaving, stitches and gold thread manufacture.

Although there's no gold, Gale couldn't resist also mentioning the Bayeux Tapestry, on which we'd previously had (a much less researched!) talk and from which we'd stitched some small samples. 

Thank you, Gale, for a great talk.

If you want to go down memory lane to Bayeux, look at Ro's stitched book cover in the March 2023 meeting post and the October meeting post, where there's also some modern interpretations of Bayeux stitch.