Weekend of 18th-20th May. Sue Stone

                               "Appliqué and Hand-stitched Portraits with Sue Stone

Sue's self-potrait

The weekend got off to an inauspicious start with Sue Stone's not being able to get to the Island in time to give her talk “Woman with Fish” on the Friday evening. Because a maintenance van had run into the Flybe plane at Manchester, poor Sue was transferred to Liverpool and did not arrive on the Island until gone 9 p.m.!  This meant that we had to come up with something at short notice, so, for those who attended, we had a relaxed and sociable ‘social stitching’ evening.  However, without Sue, the evening ended early. 

From then on things improved spectacularly and the two-day workshop and the rest of the weekend were a huge success.

Eleven members had booked on Sue’s two-day workshop “Appliqué and Hand Stitched Portraits” which was held at the Braaid Hall and everybody turned up nice and early, which was a sign of things to come, as 4 o’clock came and there was hardly a stir from anyone to put down our stitching and go home. The next morning everybody once again came early and we were still busy stitching at 3.45 and only stopped in order to display the results of our weekend!  Normally by 3 o’clock people are tired and starting to put work away – even for a one-day workshop!

Impossible to stop!

 

Sue began by explaining her technique and then how we should transfer our image to the fabric using tissue paper and stitch.  She then spoke to each of us individually to advise about our image choices and how to tackle our piece so by lunchtime we were all well underway with our stitching and even reluctant to stop for the lovely contributory buffet lunch! 

The workshop continued in the same industrious fashion the next day.  The photographs show how the participants each tackled very different portraits and worked them in very different ways.  All of us came away having learnt such a lot and enthused with a determination to actually finish the portraits – no UFO’s from this workshop!

   

                                        The same image can be treated differently.

                                         

And this is what ladies took home!