Looking at Work

At yesterday's meeting most of the time was spent looking at work and continuing planning for BLOOM in September

and solving problems relating to the Blog!!

Bloom

Walking the coastal path in Dorset

Bookbinding

Some of the bindings I have been doing.

A Garden in Bloom

Staying in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, right now as we often do, we visited Crathes Castle near Banchory on a beautiful sunny day. The early summer flowers were at their best.

With a view to Bloom, these red and yellow poppies caught my eye.

Margaret Robbie

A gathered book

The theme for Stroud Artist’s Books this month was gather which made me think of smocking. 

After various different attempts at stitching the page sections together this is how it ended up. Sage green cotton rag handmade Khadi paper, linen thread, dark grey linen to cover boards, & dotty paper for the endpapers.

Corinne Renow-Clarke 

in Focus Stitching

In Focus Stitching in Swindon Museum and Art Gallery is now up and open for viewing. The whole exhibition features work completed by Great Western Embroiderers (of which I am a member) following exploration of the museum's archive of photographs dating from the early days of photography.

The archive reveals much about the history of Swindon. I found investigating the possibilities of the photographs fascinating and developed a body of work that explored the gender and social class differences of the time and the nature of people's daily lives.

The work shown below was developed from this single photograph of a street in Railway Village
which was built to provide accommodation for railway workers in the 19th century. Of interest to me were the tall chimneys and the lines of washing in the front gardens - thought-provoking for what they suggested about the lives of women of the time. I manipulated the image digitally, selecting, cutting and overlaying, and playing with colour and opacity to produce 8 small pieces, two of which are shown below.

All eight were then mounted onto panels and hung from a structure made by my husband so that they were suspended away from the wall to reference washing hanging on the line. 

Full details of the exhibition which runs in the community galleries of the museum until Saturday 7 September can be found in the earlier post here dated 4th May. More about my work for the exhibition can be found on my personal blog, https://charltonstitcher.blogspot.com/, 

Margaret Robbie

Flower of Makarrech

This wonderful flower was photographed in Marrakech on a recent visit. Its name is unfortunately unknown - but perhaps that's not surprising as it was found in the city's Secret Garden!

Linda Babb