Here’s a photo of work from the recent workshop on Silk Ribbon Embroidery that was run by SCS member Jan Angove. It looks like a lovely day.
Month: May 2024
Rainbow squares
If you were a member way back when, you may have stitched one of these ‘Rainbow Squares’. It was a regional project where individual members of each group embroidered a square in the colour allocated to their group. They were then assembled in ‘chains’ and hung alongside the different colours from the other groups. You might like to know that they have been gathered together again, and exhibited at the Guildford House Gallery in Guildford (ours are the dark green ones). I saw them all together once a few years ago, and they look amazing in real life. You can see them there from today until to June 15th. It’s a long way to go, but Guildford is a nice place for shopping and a day out. Apologies for the quality of the photos (they lost quality through being emailed to me).
Textile treasures at Worthing museum
What a delightful morning we had at Worthing museum, enjoying a ‘show and tell’ session with Gerry Connelly, Head of Museums and Exhibitions. Gerry started his career in fashion design, before specialising in the History of Fashion. Gerry was the perfect person to show us some of the wonderful items that are owned by the museum but are not usually out on display.
Gerry started by showing us the oldest item in the collection, a blackwork jacket dating from 1610. It’s amazing that it is so well preserved.
We had a wonderful range of items to look at closely, and it’s lovely to see them without the reflections that you get when they’re behind glass. A couple of Elizabethan dress items: a fragment of embroidery that was probably originally on a jacket, and an embroidered glove that was probably given as a symbolic gift rather than for regular use, although it was interesting to see the signs of wear on the underneath.
We saw a stunning embroidered waitcoat that could have come straight out of ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’ story, with stitching so fine that it could well have been stitched by mice.
It was lovely to have time to study the details, and we could have happily stayed there all day.
Gerry brought out an embroidery called ‘The Warwick Street Embroidery’, which was stitched by our group in 2004. We had searched for it and no-one was sure where it was, but we were delighted to see that it is in the safe care of the museum. The embroidery was created by cutting up a historic photograph of Warwick Street, and distributing the cut-up rectangles to individual members to stitch. It was then re-assembled to re-create the picture. The names of the individual embroiderers were stitched on the back.
Lunch together afterwards was a lovely way to end the visit. Thanks to Chris for organising it all.