We are a group of women (but men are welcome!) who have an interest in textile art and embroidery. We are of mixed abilities and there is no need for you to be able to sew to come and join us - there are no tests!
New members are always welcome - why not call in and join us as a guest for a few months?
Meeting fee for visitors is only £5.
Our meetings vary - we have talks and workshops, show and tell - we also have lots of weekend workshops and playdays. For details of what's coming up (and what's been and gone!) check out our programme below...

Monday 11 April 2011

April Meeting - Mary Conway - "Thoughts on Paper"

Several new members and some welcome old faces joined us for tonight's meeting. Before Mary began her talk, she kindly judged our 2011 Branch Challenge, which was based on the same categories as the Regional Competitions (got to get those entries in there somehow!). The categories were, "Chemistry", "A Confection", and "A Flower Beginning with the Letter A". There were lots of entries, displaying all manner of skills and ideas.

In second place, Mary chose Cath Moore's thought provoking piece on the way that a flawed DNA gene can affect a family's health, in the "Chemistry" category.

In first place (drum roll...) Mary chose Val Turner's beautifully machine stitched (at arm's length?) piece in the "Confection" category. You can tell from these two examples that the standard of work was extremely high and we are hopeful of coming home with some trophies at Regional Day!

Mary's talk detailed her work with paper, starting with her early days of making concertinas from bus tickets, and I suspect that she was not the only one!
Mary's samples were very delicate and intricate and she told us that she often worked with tracing paper in order to get a knife-sharp crease.

One of her major pieces was based on Roger Akroyd's library at Bankfield Museum and included her making a translucent smoking jacket out of organdy based on one of Roger's jackets, this was then laid on photo-sensitive paper and the resulting photos reassembled into a picture of the jacket.

As you can see from the above piece, there is a heavy Japanese influence to some of Mary's work, which involves very accurate paper-folding.
She is currently working on a project detailing how climate change is predicted to affect the coastlines of some countries, due to the rise in sea levels.

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