Two months running!!

Hello girls and all followers of our Blog.

My plan was to really shock and have the meeting info up and on the blog the same night as the meeting and all was going well until I booted up my computer only to find I had security problems I had to deal with and when I had sorted that out I really could not face all the typing as we had quite a busy meeting.

However owing to the postponement of the workshop today owing to inclement weather I find myself with the dog in front of the fire (looking at the snow) and thought I could usefully spend my time getting you all informed of what is going on.

First the talk - one of our members Cluny Chapman spoke to us about how she takes much of her inspiration from Archaeology and then how she translates those images into embroidery.
She began by giving us a brief resume of her credentials both in the world of  archaeology and the world of embroidery and then was straight into the body of the talk which was well illustrated  and supported  by a PowerPoint presentation. This talk really impressed the teacher in me as it was well structured and followed a time line throughout from 30,000 years ago to Medieval times and on that journey we visited a wide variety of venues and artifacts: we learned about various archaeological techniques both above and below ground: and most importantly we saw how many embroidery techniques could be used to interpret the source  material.
Cluny brought with her many examples of her work which was all of an excellent standard and covered a wide variety of techniques including goldwork, feltmaking, whitework, lacemaking, mixed media, canvaswork and machine embroidery.
I have to hold my hands up at this point and tell you that I have been good friends with Cluny for many years but even with that in mind I enjoyed the talk and would happily recommend Cluny to all you Programme Secretaries out there.

The Baltimore Quilt
 The Quilt has been living with me for January and I have to say lots of people came to help me stitch - lured here with the promise of good biscuits and the chance to meet my fantastic dog - the upshot of which is that we have made fantastic progress this month - so a big thank you to all who helped.  One of my regular attenders, Liz Lumb had an absolutely cracking idea -  to mark each uncompleted square in some way to help us find them more easily. To hand was some blue ribbon and safety pins so this was what we did and then the natural extension of this was that if you completed a square you could then remove the ribbon and pin it to your chest and wear it with pride!!!!!!!    I have to tell you that one person (the chair!!) who was present at this new innovation promptly went off, found two nearly completed squares, finished them and claimed two blue ribbons!!  -