North Kent Embroiderers Workshop

I was back in North Kent, Southfleet to be precise, at the end of March for a Stitchscape workshop. I had previously given a talk to this group in 2023 I think and they’d booked me fairly quickly after then to come back, but way in advance. How far away 2025 sounded then! 

I had kept in touch with the group between times as a couple of the ladies joined in with the Stitchscape Swap for a while and I had the occasional email or letter about what the group was up to. It is lovely to have that kind of correspondence with many of the different groups I’ve visited. Quite often links are made and relationships forged which hopefully are mutually beneficial as I will occasionally contact them back with events coming up that they might be interested in. 

It was a mixed theme workshop, a half and half of coastal scenes and countryside sheep with a volcano mixed in. One lady had brought in an inspirational card with a design by Jo Grundy that she was using to help her map out her landscape. (I had a Jo Grundy calendar one year and saved the gorgeous images as prints for a while on my wall.) 

Most of the other ladies were coming in completely blind with no real thoughts to what they were going to do - using the fabrics and perhaps my suggestions to start them off. 

I had created workshop packs for them, which contain five fabrics that I put together - all completely different - in the hopes that it would kick start an inspiration for them. As I’ve said before though, they don’t have to keep to those fabrics; they can swap them with a friend, take them out completely, rummage in my stash bag, use their own…. Whatever they'd like to do but it does seem to help at least eliminate what they don’t want to do. 

I definitely influenced the volcano hoop after talking with the lady about how one of the Arundel stitchers had used a similar fabric colouring and made a volcano and lava field by accident. She loved that idea and went for it with a brilliant golden exploding volcano in her hoop. 

Quite a lot of people had also brought some items from their own stashes which is always fun. Stitchscapes are such a brilliant way of using up those small odds and ends of things that you can’t bear to throw away but accumulate in places. Different lengths of yarn or half a packet of beads, the rest of a thread card from a kit. 

I love this piece with the sunset and lapping waves. The yarn for the breaking waves at the front is from my stash (Stylecraft Moonbeam yarn - sadly discontinued) but the variegated yarn waves further in was from their stash and I think it goes absolutely perfectly with the sun and thinking of a light reflection on the water. There’s so much movement been created there just by having the right coloured yarn, and stitching it down into rows. 

The piece above is laid out so that you can see the seabed looking up to the top of the water and the sky above. We'd discussed using the big pink flowers in the print as a base for pink corals, stitching textures over them to take away from the flower-look, perhaps adding in textured rocks for them to grow out of and using lots of trimmings to make other coral types and seaweeds so that it becomes a real haven for little fish and sea creatures to live in. She had just started to think about how to texture the flowers/corals on the right hand side there with tufty moss stitch in pink so this one will be really different when finished!

The stitchers have given themselves until the end of the year to finish their pieces so hopefully I will get some finished photos from them at some point as well.