Bad Blogger....

Wow, nearly halfway through the month and I haven't posted since the 1st.  It's not as though I haven't got much to blog about it's just time running away.

Last week I took a couple of days holiday so that I could go to the Regional Day at the Hamworthy Club near Wimborne.  This was, unusually, on a Thursday but it was well attended, 91 people, better than a Saturday.  The second day, Friday, I went to workshop taught by Sheena Norquay, which was really enjoyable.  More of that later.

Thursday's Regional Day had 2 speakers, one of them, Kate Dowty comes from west Dorset and her main influences are the countryside and the sea as she lives not far from the coast.  She does not do precise piecing but does have a more artistic approach to her work and uses layers of fabrics and paints and dyes also.  She bought along a lot of quilts to show and here are some photos that I took, but there's loads more to see on her website (link above).

There were also a selection of quilts from We Are Sailing (including mine in the middle bottom row) which the makers received back at the end of the day.

There was also a challenge "Autumn" though one of the photos is a bit dark as this stand was right in the corner of the hall

After lunch the next speaker was Sheena Norquay, a quilter came down from Scotland to do talks and workshops in the South West.  She had a slideshow and talked about her life on Orkney and the influences in her quilting.  Like Kate, she is a prize winning quilter and here are the photos that I took of her quilts. 

On Friday a trip to Osmington, near Weymouth, for the workshop that Sheen was teaching called Shining Circles. Using fabric paints and metallic thread for making long skinny wall hangings, although some made square with 4 blocks.  Here is mine, after applying fabric paint but before stitching.

Templates made from sticky backed plastic were used to make the positive and negative circle shapes and a variety of items were used for the small circle shapes including corks, drinking straws and screw heads and anything that would make some texture. 

I took photos of other people's samples when shown at the end of the workshop.

This was a great way of showing what can be achieved with paint and stitch and definitely some ideas to explore later. I really like the purple on with the "bubble" circles on it.

A busy couple of days holiday and worth taking as I wouldn't have wanted to miss these events.