November Playday - Endless Seascapes

There's no better way to spend a wet November Saturday than stitching away at a joint (yet individual) project with your fellow members. 
This month we set about producing some Endless Seascapes. 
We started off with an A5 template (21cm x 15cm) and measured 6cm down from the top for the sky, then another 9.5cm down for the sea, the rest being shore. (Except for Rona who tried to be different and had the sea somewhere else altogether for a while!) We were free to use any techniques, colours and materials that we wanted and ended up with lots of different results. 

**Don't forget that you can click on the photos to get a better view**

Margaret applied scrim, beads and wind farms to hers and added footprints as a tribute to Acker Bilk!

Mandy made the sea and sand out of chopped up silk and then machine stitched over the top. The clouds are white velvet. 

Davina quilted hers, embellished with machine stitching and then made some stuffed pebbles

Isobel couched threads down and added lacy foam and ribbon for sand - she is going to paint the sky in later

Abi used cellophane and plastic as well as more conventional fabrics to produce her beach scene (love the reflection!)

Cath is working towards a tropical paradise by hand-stitching beach shades on her island scene

Helen painted the background with acrylics and then applied hand embroidered seagulls, waves and pebbles and some little fabric shells

Julie couched down her home-spun wool for a very textured sea and added wool pebbles and shell sections to the foreground. 

Cath applied pieces of different coloured fabric and then machine embroidered them to give texture to the sea and sand

Rona eventually got the sea in the right place and added a lovely little felt boat on hand-stitched waves

Wyn trapped chopped up fabric under net and machine stitched over the top, and is going to add cords and hand-stitched barnacles (see yesterday's post).

Sue obviously started hers three weeks ago as she has sand, sea, waves, sky, clouds, lighthouses...

Janice embroidered by machine and hand on a silk background, and added frayed scrim waves

Irene used many different fabrics and machine stitches to give this patchwork effect

Jan applied strips of fabric and added sari-silk yarn to give more texture to the sea, also cutting back parts of the sky

This is what they look like when they are placed together - obviously at the moment they are not in any particular order or finished or edged, but it will give you the general idea...

Check back at a later date for the finished results...

November Meeting - A bit of Stitching, a bit of Folding, and a lot of chatting!

No speaker for our November meeting but still lots going on. Firstly we learned about upcoming Regional Events and hopefully by now members are stitching away at their entries into the Regional Competitions in June - Journeys, Maps and a Flower beginning with "E". We had lots of new members and visitors - there was hardly a seat left!

Next Davina showed us how to make different types of folding books to display our "Stitch Challenge" two-inch stitch samples, and helpfully brought us all some ready-cut paper to start our books off. 

Then, Wyn showed us how to use button-hole / blanket stitch to embellish any ring-shaped item and turn it into something beautiful (drinking straws, who'd have thought?)

Here's Wyn's gorgeous Buttonhole Stitch sample to give you an idea of what it could have looked like...

Purely by coincidence, Sue had been working on some Dorset buttons (same technique but the seam is on the inside) and had embellished them with bunches of flowers...tiny but perfectly formed, as you can see (penny included to show scale).