Even more overlocker samples

I spent a day at a workshop learning all about the different feet available for my overlocker. As some of those babies cost about 20 quid a pop it was worth playing around with somebodyelse's before coming up with my wish list. I had a good day picking up tips, learning news tricks with overlocker and getting to play with some feet. Unfortunately I wasn't able to really play with ones suitable for the coverstitch capability that my overlocker had. Also, I had to get a new cutting blade (I think my overlocker's previous owner had had a run in with a pin or two) so my budget for a new foot was spent. Still, my birthday is coming up and Christmas is only round the corner!

Workshop catch up

Before noting recent events I will just share with you the outcome from a workshop that I attended at the Winchester Discovery Centre. I was going to say new but realise it has been open for nearly a year now. One of the centre pieces of this revamped and "souped" up library (which is that and more - gallery space, performance space and so on) is a large embroidery hanging in the cafe by Alice Kettle. The workshop held at the centre was led by Alice herself - I leapt at the opportunity when C told me about it.

The day started off with us all introducing ourselves: we were a good mix of ex C&G, textile students and other enthusiasts. There was a lot to do in the hours we had. So we started with various drawing exercises. As I hadn't sketched for a while I was a little cautious and not overly enamoured of my results. This didn't matter however as we were then encouraged to tear, cut or manipulate our sketches in order to develop a collage:

We didn't have a huge amounts of time to develop the collage but limited time meant that I couldn't procrastinate (too much). We then looked at various hand stitched to consider trying out - prompted from our collages. It was a huge treat to look (and touch) some of the samples that Alice brought along. It was a further treat when we got to dig around in the fabrics and threads she brought along for us to develop our stitching.

From the collage that I created earlier I wanted to develop the wave and movement and chose to do this in a simple running stitch. My final stitching sample didn't bear much relation with my collage. My collage was a good jumping off point though.

I thoroughly enjoyed my day stitching with C and learning from Alice. Any more workshops would be well worth following up.