Day School with Susan Ruark - Silk Painted Embroidery Pictures

Susan is one of our newer members, and gave this day school based on her beautiful silk painted embroideries. She had brought along many examples of her work, and demonstrated how to paint wet and dry. The ladies then painted their silk in random shapes, allowing the paint to flow and mingle. They then made a sandwich with wadding and backing and hooped it. Everyone elected to hand sew, so spent a relaxing day letting their imagination wander and using various stitches and threads to enhance their colourful creations.

Collaged Cards, talk by Beth Edward

We had a little diversion from our usual textile themes talks, with a talk and demo by Beth Edward. Beth is an ex primary school teacher, who has crafted all her life, but found her niche with collage. Many of the pictures are inspired by the west of Scotland coastline, and it was here she discovered collage, on a course on the island of Tanera Mor, and she has never looked back since. She explained the process of making her cards, where she paints tissue paper with a sponge in various colours of acrylic paint, and then tears it up to create her little pictures and decoupage boxes. Many of the card images are quite tiny and intricate.

After the talk, some of the ladies had the opportunity to play with paint and tissue paper to take home and create their own collage.

Mixed Media Artwork

Beth's first collage

A larger framed collage

Christmas cards

Decoupage boxes

Torn up tissue ready for collaging

Playtime!