Bling and sparkle

The first AGM of Southdowns Creative Stitchers was held yesterday. It was good to celebrate the start of our new independent stitch group. The Chair’s report will be available for members; the brief summary is that after a lot of hard work, we are now well established as an independent stitch group with a healthy membership, healthy budget, and lots going on. After a lot of hard work sorting out things like a new constitution, bank account, budget etc., we are very pleased that we we can get on with what we all enjoy…stitch. The business part of the meeting was dealt with quickly, allowing time to look at the pop-up exhibitions and to catch up with old friends and new members.

Mavis Shoesmith inspired us with a pop-up exhibition of her City and Guilds work – you will find some photos of her display later in this post. Also on show were pop-up exhibitions by the three sub-groups; Traditional Embroidery, Thursday Workshop and Mixed Media. Photos below.

We also had the ‘Travelling Scrapbooks’ out for people to see. These are 14 scrapbooks that were created as a lockdown project. Each person chose a visual project and provided a sketchbook. The books then travelled round the group so that people could add their own contributions to that subject. At the end, the books ended up with their original owners, stuffed full of inspiration and surprises from other people. We hadn’t quite appreciated just how much work would be on show in these books, so a brief showing didn’t do them justice. We will try to think of a better way to show then another time – maybe here on the website, or maybe as a slide show at one of our ‘sit and stitch’ meetings.

Here are some images of work by the three different sub-groups. What a wonderful mixture of techniques, media, designs and colour…and what a lot of ‘woman-hours’ must have gone into all of these!

Traditional Embroidery group and Thursday workshop group

And now on to Mavis Shoesmith’s work. Mavis brought her City and Guilds work for us to see and drool over. The name of this post is ‘Sparkle and Bling’ for a reason; Mavis loves to use glittery, sparkly additions to her work. She brought a very wide range of work, from traditional to experimental. Inspirations for her designs come from such different sources that make her work very individual and varied. Thank you Mavis!