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| My finished piece from Rebekah Johnstone's workshop |
Every year the Yorkshire & Humber Embroiderers' Group (YHEG) organise a residential Summer School at Bishop Burton College near Beverley, East Yorkshire. It is a two and a half day stitching extravaganza. There are 4 workshop streams to choose from. This year's tutors were:
Rebekah Johnston - The Fabric of Home
Toni Buckby - Introduction to Historic Blackwork Embroidery
Rachael Singleton - Re-Imagined
Kate Slaughter - Waxing Lyrical with Colour and Print
I am a member of YHEG but this is the first year I have been to Summer School. I took Rebekah Johnstone's workshop.
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| Examples of Rebekah Johnstone's work |
Rebekah is a Nottingham based textile artist working with repurposed domestic fabrics and natural dyes to create quilts and textile pieces rooted in memory, resilience and a sense of home. Her practice combines hand-stitching, needle-turn and raw edged applique, boro inspired mending, darning methods, distressing fabrics as well as quilt construction and binding methods.
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| Rebekah's natural dyed fabric & threads & commercial threads for us to use |
Rebekah’s workshop was inspired by her quilt project “The Fabric of Home”, which explored the meaning of home through cloth, memory, and repair. Images of the quilt and examples of her work were at the summer school to introduce the theme and activities of the weekend.
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| Some of the participants' work from Rebecca Johnstone's workshop |
My piece (see top photo) was based on a repeating theme of a window in my house.
At the end of the weekend everyone lays their work out and we get a chance to go round and see what everyone has done in the different workshops. As a bit of background here's a little about the other tutors and what each workshop offered, taken from the Summer School info...
Toni Buckby is a Sheffield based artist working with traditional textile techniques, experimental digital/electronics, and acts of collective making. Her work explores ideas of skilled practice, the value of labour, the visibility of authorship, and the creation and accessibility of practical knowledge. Specialising in fine hand embroidery, Toni is currently undertaking a PhD with Sheffield Hallam University and the Victoria & Albert Museum, investigating how fine art practice can be used to reconstruct, interpret, and present fragile and inaccessible Blackwork embroideries.
The summer school project consisted of one of Toni's Historic Blackwork Kits with pre-printed fabric, embroidery threads and needles.
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| Some of the participants' work from Toni Buckby's workshop |
Rachael Singleton is an experimental textile and mixed media artist living in South Yorkshire. Her work brings together creative thought and practical engagement with a variety of materials. Layering forms her signature process through the employment of varied materials in order to make her ideas come to life. She is greatly inspired by the natural world which is a constant source of enchantment and she is also deeply interested in containment.
Working with a well known favourite painting, students ‘mined’ their images of it for various visual elements, collecting a bank of patterns to translate onto cloth. The aim was to create a range of fabrics that could be reconstructed into abstracted designs by either hand or machine stitching.
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| Some of the participants' work from Rachael Singleton's workshop |
Kate Slaughter is a textile artist, dyer, and tutor who takes inspiration from the beautiful flowers and landscapes of Northumberland and Cumbria. She creates hand painted yarns and threads in a range of colours, adding unique texture and character to her designs.
Kate's workshop taught students how to transform plain fabrics with surface decorative techniques including wax crayons, bondaweb, inktense ink blocks, transfer paints and wooden printing blocks. Participants were also encouraged to add additional surface decoration using simple hand embroidery with a range of different threads and yarns.
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| Some of the participants' work from Kate Slaughter's workshop |
Kate also had some very colourful threads and kits for sale...
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| Kate Slaughter's Kits & Threads |
It was a great weekend. Apart from the luxury of two and a half days stitching with like minded souls there was good food (Yorkshire portions), a super walled garden and pleasant accommodation. Thank you to Pauline, the YHEG organisers and tutors.
It was the heatwave weekend so it was very warm. Afterwards I took myself off to Bridlington for a swim and an ice cream...
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| Bridlington South Beach |
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| Refreshment after a swim |
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