More cards, but a little bit of a different theme today – Somerset patchwork! Ribbons are wonderful, versatile things. You can wrap presents and decorate with them, embroider them to make particularly lovely looking flowers and cut them up and fold them over to may all sorts of fanciful shapes.
Last week was the exhibition that accompanies the Hand and Lock Prize for Embroidery, which is a seriously lavish celebration of embroidery talent. There are several categories to the prize, including Fashion and Textile, with Open and Student levels. Whether you love all the individual exhibition pieces or not, there is no denying that the Prize attracts a veritable cornucopia of talent and is the ultimate ‘up yours’ to anyone who doesn’t think embroidery can be art.
Ufffff… well, I guess I should start this post with an apology to both you and my neglected blog. Sadly I have not skipped off into some fibery sunset to develop new innovative chain plying methods, instead the reasons for my absence are rather more lame. Being the eternal optimist about time commitments, I had hoped that the last few weeks would just be standard levels of busy rather than ‘everything is on fire’ status.
This is a great shot of how my coffee table currently looks. Beads, beads, beads, a marked-up temari, embroidery cases and the V&A’s latest magazine that I thoroughly blame for causing the bead situation in the first place. They have a Fabergé exhibition coming up soon and so had the most wonderful jewel-encrusted piece on the front cover which left my inner magpie hankering for shiny things…
If April is the cruellest month, then May is the month of utter madness when the weekends become extensions of the working week and thriving is renamed surviving… I am tired. Still, it has passed, many totally uncrafty things got done, but a few crafty ones snuck in there as well.
Last week’s post marked a dangerous turning point in my machine embroidery confidence where I realised that doing multi-part construction wasn’t so bad after all and, while getting things aligned with dielines wasn’t fun, it was feasible.
My craft frustration threshold has been feeling rather low of late. I seem to go through phases where every project I touch transforms into a mess of tangled threads and wonkily cut fabrics and please don’t ask how trying to stitch some curved seams went the other weekend. I will have to wait a bit to blog about one particularly glorious failure other the post will need a ‘strong language and description of scenes of great violence’ disclaimer over the top of it otherwise…
Traditionally, my first post of the new year is a chance to say welcome to the new year. This year I think I’ll break with traditional slightly and the new year’s post will be a chance to say goodbye to the old one! Well, 2020, what can I say?
Nothing like a good Christmas deadline to focus the mind and needle… Traditionally, I am terrible at Christmas. I barely manage to get Christmas cards to friends and people who definitely deserve it, even though I really appreciate everyone who is infinitely more competent, organised and takes the time to think of me. I usually deal with this by an absolute refusal to make handmade Christmas gifts, saving them for birthdays instead, but I did want to at least try and redeem myself as a human being this year…
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Sadly all good things must come to an end, including the London Embroidery School’s Lace Series course but at least it ended with another nice technique, Limerick lace. Like a lot of laces, it was something I recognised, but never knew the name for and it was a really interesting experience to get the chance to work on a new ground fabric, net.
astitchornine 