Summer school and stitchery

Last weekend I went with a group of friends from my local branch of the Embroiderers Guild to our annual summer school. It's held at an agricultural college in East Yorkshire and there are people there from all over the Yorkshire and Humberside region. It's good to meet up with friends old and new and to learn together in lovely surroundings.

There is a beautiful walled garden in the grounds, which they open up for us on the Saturday afternoon. 

Aren't the carvings on these benches amazing?!

There are usually four workshops to choose from and this year there was a traditional silk and goldwork class making a Tudor design taken from the sleeve of a lady's gown, a goldwork class which used traditional techniques in modern ways, an experimental mixed media class and a needlelace group. No prizes for guessing that I took the needlelace class! Actually I would have loved to do the goldwork and I did buy the tutor's book so I'm planning to play with that some day soon.

Here's what I did over the weekend. It doesn't look like a lot of work does it? The flower is quite large though and the thread is very fine - machine embroidery cotton. I learned lots of new techniques as this is my first piece of Point de Gaze work. As lace goes this is quite a recent style and was first made in Belgium in the latter part of the 19th century. The flowers are three dimensional with extra petals stitched to the front of the flower - you can see the outlines of the extra petals laid on the matte film waiting to be stitched.

I've done quite a bit of additional work on it since I came home. I'm loving these deep purples!

This little sampler was what I was working on before I went away. The key thing on this piece will be the edgings (cordonnettes) which will be decorated in lots of different ways in the Venetian Gros Point style. This technique is much older as it dates back to the 17th century.

And in the evenings, when the light is too poor to stitch with fine purple thread, I've completed another double page spread of the embroidery sample book. This page is blackwork - another big favourite of mine.