Report from January Meeting–talks by 3 members from the Merseyside Branch.

As anticipated a very good afternoon with the three members from Merseyside - Norma Heron;  Karen  Scott and Marie Stacey

Firstly Norma’s work – machine stitched on her trusted Bernina and all very different – the first - a piece of stitched and slashed fabric for a small ‘Water’ quilt – a technique very hard on the hands;
then  a piece called ‘Resurrection’ with applied gold leather and fabric pieces – some of which were eaten by her dog before she could get them all stitched on!!!

    
After a trip to Petra there were photographs of the wonderful ‘red rocks’ with colour and drawn samples which led to pieces inspired by the colours – a stitch sample piece and a cushion shown below.

 

The next speaker – Karen Scott who had been made redundant, wanted to take up a hobby, heard about the Guild when she was on a course, and joined the Branch. She was so bowled over by it all that she is now doing a Textiles degree at John Moore’s university in Liverpool where she has discovered, among other things, melting and burning and the use of digital technology in textiles.
She had made a Kaleidoscope and Trileidoscope so that she could photograph pieces of painted fabric through them to get some very different patterns – shown below are my photographs of some of her fabric pieces –taken through her ‘scopes’ - absolutely fascinating.

Then for Marie Stacey who first of all gave us all a health warning about
Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) – and her symptoms – amongst other things, straight lines started to look wavy and distorted.    Her warning being that you should act before it is too late – she could have gone blind very quickly!
Marie had put up with these symptoms for some months before realising there was something wrong and eventually after treatment, her sight was saved and though it wasn’t perfect she wanted to get back to stitching - 
BUT she discovered that it was more difficult than she expected and as she knew a very accomplished local tutor who was also a friend, she was eventually convinced by her that she should take up machine embroidery, and that is what she started to do using a magnifying glass attached to the machine.

You can see two pictures below of some of her recent work - firstly a machine embroidered panel made on a course with Louise Gardner – please note the ‘TIE’ border using those ‘dreaded ties’!
We may see it at the Regional exhibition.
It tells the story of the Murdoch enquiry and makes fascinating reading!

 
And now onto Goldwork – something she thought she would never do again, but with a lot of perseverance she managed to complete this piece on a course with Golden Hinde.

A lesson learnt and an inspiration to us all.

Many thanks to all 3 members for a very entertaining afternoon.