Out & About - North East Embroiderers' Guild Weekend

Love the leaves and the contrasting colour added around them

Things have been wonderfully busy for the past month - lots of exciting teaching, some days away with the family over the Easter holidays in the North Yorks Moors, a little bit of experimenting with my new heat press and even more teaching.  All great fun, but it means I haven't had much time to blog (sorry Mum).  So time to rectify that and get blogging again and I'm going to start by telling you about my fabulously intense time with the North East (of England) Embroiderers' Guild at their spring school in one of the colleges of Durham University.  The course was called 'Print, Paint, Play' - try saying it fast - not very easy!

Selection of one student's work

They started work on the Friday afternoon and when I arrived at about 10pm, as I had been teaching at home, there was still some activity going on in the room and a great start had been made using Inktense, along with a scavenger hunt for materials to print with.  Over the next two days, I introduced painting with thickened dyes, gelli plate printing and using Markal paintstiks.  

Love the black print on white fabric using a stencil

I was really impressed with all that they managed to create - very inspiring for me too, particularly in how they used stencils.  Normally I am working with quilters, so I thought that the embroiderers would approach things differently, but actually, I didn't see much difference.  Perhaps only that they were happy to make smaller panels and mount them rather than stitching them together into a larger piece.

Great interpretation of a cave painting theme

All of the photos in this post are of their work.  

Two different colourways of the same printed tatted bookmark

On the Saturday afternoon, there were a few hours off and I headed into the centre of Durham to visit the cathedral, a place I visited often in childhood.  My memory of it was surprisingly clear - even the cafe looked as I thought it would!  I was lucky and timed my visit so that I heard some of Evensong.  It was really calming and a lovely way to spend some down time whilst teaching so intensively.

Great use of a stencil over a print

Lovely surface

Looking at the work at the end of the weekend

Fab gelli plate print of found leaves.  We were looking rather longingly at the lovely big house plants in the college, but they were too healthy to have shed leaves!

Rubbing of honesty leaves over dyed fabric

Sometimes things are just more effective on black fabric than white