Urchfont Manor

 

Regular readers will know that for the last few years I have been going to the Distant Stitch summer school at Urchfont Manor near Devizes in Wiltshire and how wonderful it is there, a I am sure many have also been there themselves.  The manor is an adult education centre run by Wiltshire County Council offering day and residential courses, but its future is now under threat.  My tutor, Sian has explained the position on her blog post here – please take a minute to read it and then contact Wiltshire County Council to support the rescue plan.

Silhouette Quilt

Every now and again, I decide I need to practice free machining to get more control.  This time, rather than just stitch random samples, I took one of the designs from my City and Guild diploma work on faces which was based on  a silhouette of my daughter (see this post on Gallimaufry for details) and made a little quilt, about 18” by 12”.  I wanted to try working some of the interesting fillers designs from the free motion quilting project but made the fundamental error of choosing very busy fabric, which meant that most of the time I couldn’t see what I was stitching.  Still, you learn by your mistakes  - the next one will be better.

Front

Back

Finally - an Irish Dance Dress

Well, I have been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently but not entirely idle.  I have spent rather a lot of time making a dance dress for my younger daughter and we didn’t want to show it until it was finished.  As tends to happen, it turned out nothing like the original plan so that is probably just as well.  She is very into “dark romance” (but gets very offended if you call her a goth) wears an awful lot of black, and reads novels with vampires in, so there was no point in making a frothy, girly dress. 

Here she is ready for her competition (apart from the shoes).  The dress is black silk with machine embroidery and the skirt is lined with the same red satin as the shawl – I themed it on a raven which is her favourite bird and  crops up in celtic mythology.  We added a fluorescent red tutu underneath to make the skirt fuller and it gives a flash of  bright colour as she dances.  It doesn’t come out in the photos, but the dress is actually quite sparkly – I stuck on over 220 Swarovski rhinestones.  Many on the bodice are black so they reflect under lights but look more like studs (again a bit less girly).  The machine embroidery designs came from the embroidery library, I  just changed the colours to fit her style.  

I rather like the small bird on the shawl which was stitched onto felt and cut out to make a brooch.  The finishing touch is the headband –  more machine embroidery but this time it is my own design.  And more bling of course.

You may already know that I am going to design and make an Irish dance dress for my elder daughter as part of my City and Guilds coursework (functional 3d item) – so keep an eye on my blog Gallimaufry as I will shortly be posting my background notes on styles and fashions.

Embroidered X-Rays

Go and check out the work of Matthew Cox - fascinating use of embroidery on x-rays, sometimes a bit creepy, sometimes touching.  Tip passed on from Urban Threads blog StitchPunk 

Street Art in Bristol

I used to work in these office blocks and they were pretty grey and grim 20 years ago  - the heating was rubbish so we had smelly gas heaters next to our desks (yuk).  I was pleased to hear that they were being given a makeover by invited street artists.

And I like these examples of yarnbombing

Love the sign on the old police station.

Finding the colour of...

I came across this intriguing website the color of from reading Trekky's blog.  If you choose a word, it combines images from pulled from Flickr and averages out the colours give you the colour of your word.  I like the image for gallimaufry - suitably random.

Exhibition - Gordano Textile Artists

A quick plug for our exhibition coming soon - it is my first time with this well-established group so please come along if you are in the area.

 Gordano Textile Artists at the Toll House Gallery, Clevedon Pier, North Somerset.
2nd to 30th August, 10am to 5pm Mon-Fri, 10am to 6pm Sat and Sun.
Meet the artists each weekend 11am to 3pm - I will be there on Sat 6th August and Sat 27th August.