Another dark and dismal day in Fallowfield was brightened by our first face-to-face meeting of 2026 and a busy day of workshop, stitching, quest speaker, chatting and, of course, tea, coffee and biscuits.
The morning started with a workshop, 'Bayeux with Bling', led by Sue. Very appropriate for a year that will see the Bayeux Tapestry being displayed in London.
Here are some of Sue's samples:
After a stitching demo from Sue and some discussion about the threads to use (and keeping them neat) everyone was soon able to complete the preparation of their fabric and start work. Filling area with Bayeux stitch can be quite slow at first, but once a rhythm is established its an easy stitch and has lots of possibilities for adaptation - which can make choosing threads time-consuming, if there are lots of options! The instruction had been to make a design with relatively small areas to stitch, so everyone felt they had made reasonable progress by the end of the two hours.
Our afternoon speaker was Elizabeth Almond, an accomplished embroiderer and designer, perhaps best known for her Blackwork teaching. Liz had visited us before for a workshop on Kogin embroidery, but a talk on 'Whitework for Today' gave us the opportunity to listen to an authoritative and knowledgeable speaker and have a close look at work from this prolific stitcher.
Liz talked about using various whitework techniques and stitches suitable for modern fabric and threads (and eyesight!), with a very useful emphasis on checking 'colour'-matching for both. 'Shades of White' applies to embroidery as well as paint! As you would expect with such an enormous catalogue of work, Liz had brought with her lots of samples we could pass round, a large display of mounted work and lots of patterns to choose from. Here are a few photos of her amazing work.
Thank you, Liz, for an informative and interesting talk.
More of Liz's work can be seen on her website and she is also on Facebook and Etsy.
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