For our meeting this month, we had planned to experiment briefly with some backgrounds for stitch, and to develop our free- machine embroidery skills to stitch into them. However, Lyn, who was to teach the machine part of the workshop was laid low with flu at the last minute.
Instead, we spent the day 'playing' with painted Bondaweb (discovering en-route that Heat and Bond does not work in the same way), ironing this on to a variety of different fabrics, and layering with sheers, metallics, tiny sequins, gold powders, threads, and small scraps of fabric, to produce what turned out to be exciting new backgrounds for machine embroidery, either free-motion, or using the automatic patterns most of us have on our machines.
Some of the effects are quite stunning, and will make lovely bases for brooches, cards, books and boxes once stitched into. Sadly, the fabrics have not photographed well, and I suspect this is because of the high 'glitz' factor! Either that , or my camera is not functioning properly. Hopefully, the results will be shown as part of our exhibition in July.
Some of our members chose instead to continue with their Wessex Stitch work from our last meeting, which they have found fascinating. There has been a resurgence of interest in this technique recently, as I can tell by the number of 'hits' on this blog which have come from a search for Wessex Stitch Embroidery. I found this link
http://maryjoanstitching.blogspot.com/2011/08/wessex-wonders.html Nearly all the links about this subject show the same examples of work, because they are from the same book, but this stitcher has gone a bit further with her own designs. She also includes a link to another site, with even more information and pictures. Well worth a look!
Lyn, I'm sure, will lead her machine embroidery workshop sometime in the future
