Summer school

I'm feeling a bit flat today after a weekend at CQ summer school at Belstead House in Ipswich. The workshop with Helen Parrott was very enjoyable and relaxing, but above all it was FUN!!!

As I am not renowned for the quality of my hand stitching and find using a thimble nigh impossible, I had visions of a rather bleak weekend. I needn't have worried. Noone, including Helen, produced a thimble and I soon learned the difference between hand stitching and hand quilting!

Our first task on Friday after dinner and introductions was to quilt a traditional pattern onto the fabric sandwich Helen provided. We then moved on to stitching parallel rows of running stitch across the width of the fabric. After a while, the fabric began to ripple, although I was quite slow so didn't get quite as far as I had hoped with mine.



After the class broke up, we decamped to the bar where several of us stayed until quite late. As I am so new to this sort of event, and know so few people, it was really lovely to meet and talk to other members and put faces to names I had seen on the Yahoo messages.

On Saturday Helen put us through various exercises in stitching and design and I had a real eureka moment. Helen had brought lots of photos, postcards, magazine articles etc and we were asked to choose up to 15 images that pleased us. We then had to arrange them on our table in a way we found pleasing and write down what we felt about the images we had chosen in our secret book! Then everyone went around the room and wrote down on little post it notes  what we felt about the images each had chosen . Then there was a general comparison of notes and a discussion of how we all felt about it all. It was interesting to see what other people had written about someone else's choices and amazing when I found that someone else had made a comment about my choices that was exactly the same as my own.  Helen did not tell us why she had asked us to do any of this until afterwards when it became clear that this exercise is a way of getting started on a design process!

My collage of images.

So on came the light bulb when I realised that you don't have to know what you are actually going to do before you start. You can just play with images, found items etc and the ideas will start coming!  Not knowing what the end result was to be is why I have found it so difficult to actually get started on anything, but now I feel energised and full of confidence. So thank you  to Helen for helpimg me realise this.

Saturday afternoon gave me an opportunity for a short walk around the lovely grounds before getting back to the stitching. More chat in the bar on Saturday evening before turning in and at last getting some sleep! 

On Sunday there was more stitching, including French knots, and different techniques for distorting the fabric , e.g stitching spirals, knotting and making huge loopy stitches! There is so much variety from just very simple stitches. Why had I not realised this before?  Well, like many others, I've got very absorbed in fancy gizmos and had just forgotten what you can do with a bit of thread, a needle and some plain cotton fabric!

Would I do it again? Well, I'm not keen on being away from home in unfamiliar surroundings, but it was wonderful to have met so many lovely people and to have had the luck to get a place when so many others had been disappointed and I'd love to go again sometime.

I was a bit remiss in not taking photos of the event, but here are a couple of the lovely surroundings to whet your appetite! I hope there will be some more photos to see on the Yahoo group message board.

Now I'm really looking forward to going to the Festival of Quilts to meet up with some of those lovely people again. I hope by then I'll have some wonderful rippled hand quilted work to show off!

Grasses in the meadow

Textures on a wall

Bark on the Scots pine by the front door

Lavender in the garden