A new stitching year .... and what a great start we had!
The morning kicked off with a free workshop to introduce our new 'Artist of the Year' - Ton Schulten. Our leader was member, Julie, who told us snippets of Ton's life (he sadly died in 2025) inbetween getting us to complete various drawing tasks to explore how we could move towards interpreting artwork in stitch. This is Julie's sample book:
Considering many of us cringed at the dreaded 'd'(rawing!) word, we were very willing to sit with pencils and crayons to follow Julie's instructions. It was a good introduction to drawing more freely and looking at tone/shade and colour before thinking about stitch. Here are some works in progress.
Thank you, Julie, for an inspiring workshop.
Our afternoon speaker was Kate Wells from Sheffield with a talk, 'Land, Sky & Gold' about her commissioned work and experimentation for it. Kate uses a 1930s Irish machine, which has a variable-width swing needle controlled by a knee lever (and no foot!) on dissolvable fabric or fine fabrics such as silk organza and crepelline. Inspiration is taken from a multitude of sources - exhibitions, journeys, walks - with thoughts, notes, drawings and small experiments recorded in numerous sketchbooks. Some of the finished works use miles and miles of gold thread.
Kate passed around some of her larger samples which we were able to handle - not as delicate as they looked - and, at the end of the talk we browsed through the amazing sketchbooks. What an encouragement to keep one ourselves! Thank you, Kate.
Kate has a great website - https://www.katewellsartist.co.uk - showing her painted and machine-embroidered work, as well as gold lace samples.
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