Wet Windsor Wandering

Many thanks to you all for the 'welcome to blogging' messages - lovely to hear from everybody.

It was a busy day yesterday. Jane Lemon (who does wonderful goldwork and heads the Sarum group of ecclesiastical embroiderers) and I are putting together an exhibition to celebrate the life of Val Campbell-Harding. This will be touring with the UK Knitting & Stitching Shows to Birmingham, London and Harrogate. There are some wonderful bags and bookcovers but Val always described herself as 'queen of the samples' and we puzzled for a while as to the best way to display these wonderful little gems. Eventually, we hit on the idea of theming them by book as most were worked for her many books. However, it is taking us ages to mount them all up so, yesterday, I took along a secret weapon - Clive - as he's very nifty with a craft knife.

We headed off to Jane Lemon's cottage where we spent the morning mounting Val's work on A1 boards. They looked great and we are very nearly there. The boards are black as VCH always showed her work on this colour. We both liked to work dark too, and had to make a great effort for our shared books to lighten up (richly metallic, dark pieces don't photo well). We would phone each other and say things like 'I'm on dark red today - aren't I doing well'? I do miss her so much.

This is a delicious piece of Val's work, done on the embellisher and stitched. It was to be included in part two of our Embellish & Stitch book.

If I do write a follow up, I'll have to make sure that this piece goes in. At the moment, I'm writing a book for Batsford called 'Image to Stitch' about stitching into transferred digital images. Having great fun with that. The piece below shows an image of the Watts Chapel (near Guildford, Surrey). I'd redrawn and coloured from my photo, then transferred to Lazertran. I prepared a base by sticking crushed eggshells onto thick interfacing (Vilene) and floated the Lazertran off the paper and onto my image.

After a good lunch with Jane we were on our way to Windsor for the Creative Studies exhibition opening. This show was excellent this year with good results across the board. The final year work from the Higher Education Diploma students (Jan and Jean's class) is always good and was exceptional this year. Lovely to see so many old friends and J & J were both on great form. You can see a general photo from the City & Guilds exhibition below. These shoes were delightful.

Above, you can see strong work by Yumiko Reynolds from the Higher Education diploma. Based on the horrors of Hiroshima, it was beautiful and horrific at the same time.

The Advanced Embroidery Workshop students' exhibition was the biggest surprise - must find out who's teaching this as they have done such a good job. The opening speech by Diana Springall was enlivened by a huge clap of thunder and a cloudburst. This made going home quite a challenge as all the roads were flooded. Luckily our sat nav had a hissy fit and sent us home via the M25.