Polegate & Patchwork Cat Workshops

 

Apart from April, September was my busiest month this year with all of the workshops and other events I had going on. It's brilliant to feel so wanted! I wish I could do more workshops really but to run your own is a lot of risk unless you have a premises already - I would have to hire somewhere and pay for the hire than hope I have enough people attending, advertise it all etc...I did use to do it but I never really liked the places I could hire as they are often village halls which aren't light enough or can be chilly, or have hard chairs and, after a few hours of sitting still in a cold hall on a hard chair, those in the class would be getting a bit wriggly. 

Plus whenever I go to a new venue I have to lug my box of example frames and hoops, the big IKEA bag of fabrics, threads, trimmings and extra tools, a bag with sketchbooks in, the box of kits for sale, presentation baskets and my rucksack with lunch in so it is quite an ordeal. I'm not particularly portable - plus we only have the one car so I usually get given lifts to everywhere which means I have to ask someone to help and give up their own time so my workshops are not undertaken lightly. 

This first workshop was for the Polegate Stitch Ups on a, mostly, sea theme. They ranged in experience from a lady who had never done any embroidery and only liked crochet, to someone who used to teach stitching and textiles who seems to have been the founder of the group in some way if I recall rightly, to everything in between. 

As in most workshops, some people are very precise and spend a long time thinking through their fabric placement and the colour of the thread they're using or the stitches themselves, and others are a little bit more care free, sticking down fabrics and choosing threads that are vaguely the right colour but not worrying about it. It can create a very different looking landscape but none of them are incorrect. Stitchscapes embrace all skill levels, neatness levels and preciseness levels. (Ooh I didn't think preciseness was a word but it's been accepted by the word gods without a red underline!!)

Seascapes are also very accepting of some rougher areas - there was some really interesting gathering of ribbons (by working a line of running stitch through the length of ribbon and pulling it to tighten and gather the fabric), some destruction of knitting yarns to make wild and wavy grasses and stitching down of toy stuffing bundles to make frothing waves or bubbles left on the sand. 

I really need to add Drizzle stitch to my printed workshop handout of stitches as it comes up all of the time - but one lady started calling it willie stitch (I'll let you figure out why from the photo below) and the afternoon took a bit of a raucous turn after that with lots of giggling ladies . 

My next workshop was at The Patchwork Cat which is a quilting shop and café in Newhaven. Now they have an astounding amount of fabric in their shop, all stuffed into boxes as pre-cut fat quarters or on bolts around the walls. How they manage to fit it all in, as well as some tables for their café and a couple of tables for a workshop corner - it's like the Tardis!

We had a mixture of seascape and autumn woodland themed hoops in this class, and it was a lovely welcoming venue with people popping in and out all of the time. It was quite inspiring to be surrounded by lots of different patterns of fabric too. 

Some people had brought along little bits of their own stash, like beads or silvered fibres, and others just used what I had brought along but everyone uses the trimmings in different ways, or to be different things. Part of the fun is to experiment with what a material can do. Rather than just having a flat ribbon, what if you twist it, or wrap it around something else, or bunch it up in some way so that it's 3D? If you have a loosely woven fabric, can you tease it apart and use the fibres for something, what if you keep pulling them apart, do they fluff up, can that turn into something more exciting?

I hope that by sharing these photos of the workshop pieces (created mostly between the hours of 10am and 4pm, with a stop for lunch) that you can see what is possible in a short space of time, and also the range of ideas and techniques that have been created or used. I personally find workshops so inspiring just because ideas can be worked on so quickly across several different hoops and it often springboards my own ideas, or gets me itching to stitch a new hoop to practice one particular element I've been talking about all day with someone else. 

Hopefully everyone who attended found these workshops inspiring and good fun! I've been invited back to the Polegate Stitch Ups for a Christmas workshop soon so that will be exciting.