Joanna O’Neill got us off to a good start with an entertaining talk about her creative journey in textiles, which began with City & Guilds Creative Embroidery – familiar to quite a few of us. Joanna is an engaging speaker, and she explained with lots of examples how she “discovered the wonderful world of contemporary textiles – the good, the bad and the embarrassing.”
Joanna illustrated her journey with an impressive range of work she had created during that time, which focussed particularly on medieval tile designs, and brought us to the point where she started the next phase of her career.
Our appetites are wetted now for Joanna’s workshop, ‘Crossing the Line’ in March next year.
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Our day workshop with Alexandrina Dordea introduced us to the beautiful but challenging technique of
Tambour embroidery
Alexandrina explained the origins of this technique and patiently demonstrated how to get started, the way to hold the tambour hook to form stitches to attach beads and sequins onto fabric, both from the front and the back of the work. She made it look so easy and quick, but it soon became obvious that it is a skill requiring a good deal of patience and perseverance to achieve good results. It was a fun and very enjoyable day, even as we struggled to secure our beads and sequins without them then unravelling and pinging all over the floor, leaving even fewer stitches than we started with!
Dorothy’s samples here show beads added from the front of the work (larger red beads) and from the back (small beads). She did also say, “If you stitch with a needle you know that unpicking will be difficult if you need to. With tambour unpicking is too easy if you don’t want to!”
Diane also bravely managed a variety of beads and sequins:
Alexandrina was very kind about our efforts, acknowledging that it can take quite a long time to become proficient. The results, once the technique is mastered, are exquisite, of course, but we felt it could be some time before most of us produce anything like the beautiful pieces Alexandrina showed us.
