June meeting - Lynda Kinnard of Rebellious Rags

Lynda came to speak to us at this week's meeting and brought along a huge amount of her work for us to admire, and to learn from.  She loves to upcycle fabrics and admitted to regularly visiting charity shops searching for old clothes in order to replenish her stash (who doesn't?).

Lynda's work covers a number of different techniques including pegloom and stick weaving, rag rug making ('hooking' and 'proddy').  She also told us about her love of free-machine embroidery and showed how she has used it to embellish some of the work she has created:-

Above is the cover for Lynda's iPad - what a great idea!  I am now planning to stitch a new cover for my Kindle.

Here is one of Lynda's beautiful bags worked in both hooking and proddy rag rug techniques:-

and another, woven, bag worked in a striking colour combination:-

This is a selection of the tools used by Lynda to create her artworks - even the tools are beautiful:-

We all enjoyed a very interesting talk, looked at a huge amount of beautiful work and were treated to a short demonstration of rag rug weaving - a great afternoon!

May meeting - Four corners

This month we organised four different activities for members to try - the activities were:
- weaving
- hand made cords
- needle felting and use of the embellisher
- shisha mirrors

There were lots of ready-worked examples displayed for inspiration.  Enough equipment, yarns and other materials were available for members to create their own samples of different types of embellishment.  

In the first corner, here are two members weaving:-

 

In the next corner there was an opportunity to work on handmade cords, either twisted by hand or stitched on a sewing machine, using zigzag stitch.  This is a very old form of embellishment and the oldest example of a twisted cord dates back to 1500 BC.

This member is working very hard on twisting her cord...!

There was a demonstration of the embellisher machine, which doesn't require thread or a bobbin and allows you to do needle punch felting.  The needles push the fibres through the fabric to create a design.  Members were also able to try hand punch felting, which also gives excellent results:-

The fourth activity was shisha, or mirror work, where small mirrors are added to fabric using decorative stitching.  This type of work is often seen in Indian embroidery:-

Everyone had a very busy, and productive afternoon!  Don't forget to let the committee know if you have any suggestions for an activity which can be included in a Four Corners meeting.

Fibre Fusion Workshop

Last week we held a very busy and productive workshop with Hilary Naghashi, who showed us different ways of working with natural fibres, such as silk noil, bamboo fibre, tussah tops, soya bean fibre ..... the list goes on!

Hilary brought along some examples of her own work which we all admired:-

Hilary is an experienced and generous tutor and, with her supervision and help, we then began to experiment by making our own samples - as you can see, they were very successful:-

Everyone made their own collection of samples which could be worked on further at home.  Time flew by and we all wished that the workshop had been much longer!  

Expressive Stitches by Dionne Swift

Dionne's talk has been much anticipated by our members, and we were joined by a number of visitors on a very rainy day.

Dionne told us about her background and journey in textiles.  She studied at Goldsmiths College and was fortunate to have some of the very best tutors: Alice Kettle, Michael Brennand-Wood, Audrey Walker.  She offers a wide range of workshops, some of which are held at Janome (only a few miles away from Glossop) and some are based online.  Leaflets were available at the meeting but if you wish to know more details then either contact Dionne or speak to a committee member at our next meeting.

She brought along some of her work, which beautifully illustrated her use of free-machine stitching:

and through her slideshow she showed how important her sketching is to the finished textile work.  She also stitches the most covetable brooches, its so easy to visualise them on your favourite dress or jacket.

Dionne told us about some of her other work for example 'Collective Stitches' which is a touring exhibition of work undertaken by her students around the world.  She also showed images of some of the work done in her community projects.  A very busy lady!  For more information take a look at her website: www.dionneswift.com.

Elsewhere during the meeting, many of the travelling books were brought along and have now started the next step of their journey.  And we were very pleased - and impressed - to see four of the completed rag rugging projects:

North West Regional Day

A group of members drove over to Leyland in Lancashire on Saturday, 21 April to attend the North West Regional Day, hosted this year by the North West committee of which our own Chair, Ann Cornes, is a hard-working member.

At last year's Regional AGM attendees were asked to stitch a paisley shape in blue and lilac threads.  These were sent away to be incorporated into the tail of a beautiful peacock, which delighted everyone and was much admired, with everyone identifying their own tail feather:

The Guild's Members' Challenge for 2017-18 was 'Underfoot'.  There were over 80 entries including submissions by several of our members, and Christine Bardsley received a Highly Recommended certificate, which was presented to her at Regional Day.

There was a small display of work by Glossop members:

Nikki Parmenter took along her beautiful work of a peacock, which made a great contrast to the stitched hanging, and was much praised (apologies for the chairs in the background, but they were unavoidable):

So - a great day for Glossop!

Other news is that this year's Summer School is fully booked.  At the meeting everyone voted on the theme for the Regional Rose Bowl in 2020 which is 'All you need is love'.  Lots of time to produce your own work!

A Coastal Perspective by Alice Fox

At our March meeting we welcomed a number of visitors when Alice Fox came to talk to us about the work she did in 2012 whilst she was Artist in Residence at Spurn Point, a nature reserve and a place which is very exposed to the weather.  Alice was based there for six months and found the old lighthouse to be very useful for sheltering from the weather and also for displaying the work she had produced during her residency.

Her work from this time shows a range of marks and stains made on fabric and paper by the collection of discarded objects she found at Spurn Point:

The objects were trapped or stitched into cloth and exposed to the outside elements over a period of time, which resulted in a beautiful range of marks on the cloth and stitch.  The members and visitors very much enjoyed Alice's talk and found her work to be both interesting and inspirational, which generated much discussion.

Workshop - rag rugging

Ruth Turner, who is a member of Chelford EG, came to Glossop to show us how to do rag rugging.  Here is some work completed by an earlier student:-

Firstly, members drew out the shapes they wanted to include in their work:-

Then they started to work with the strips of coloured tee shirt fabric, to make their own design:-

Now everyone can admire each others' work - some beautiful rag rugging to be completed at home!