Tale of Two Members 13th January 2025

Members were welcomed back with very enjoyable presentations from two of our members Janette and Rowan. What a great start to the New Year, both were interesting and inspiring and we got to see much of their work. A real treat.

Janette began by telling us that her major inspiration for her stitching is other people. She has been particularly supported and inspired by BETA members and events. Growing up she had stitch inspirations from her family, her grandmother who was a very skilled knitter and her mother a dressmaker who took up embroidery when she retired and from her sister an accomplished quilter. She sometimes felt she didn’t match up, although she did hold on to her first piece of stitching of a dog pictured below. Janette continued to do occasional stitching and was then introduced to BETA at a sit and stitch session at the library. She was encouraged by Anne Haigh to come to BETA meetings and was also encouraged over time by Margaret Richard’s with her inspiring mantra “yes you can”. She cited other inspirational members including Angelas black work, Meriel’s landscapes and Betty Rourke. She has also participated in Travelling books and her latest contribution is shown below

Janette has continued to enjoy cross stitch and a love of pattern and enjoyed a shashiko workshop and Anne’s cross stitching workshop. She also enjoyed a workshop with Betty using a soldiering iron on felt to make bark pictures. Also pictured below are the tags she completed inspired by Anne Brooks. She has been inspired by online work including on U Tube – Roxy sisters and Corinne. Like several BETA members she has attended Little Health Barn where she made the lovely Angel shown below she completed ecodyeing at our most recent West hope weekend.

Rowan also had inspirations in her family, including a great grandmother whose house she grew up in. From an early age Rowan was cutting out hexagons for her grandmother, paper templates at first then graduating onto the fabric itself. As Rowan grew up she moved more towards painting but she did also made her own clothes, discovering that embellishments could hide errors! She had some textile art input in the sixth form. Later she did some beading, but mostly domestic stitching. A period of ill health led to her stitching in earnest resulting in wonderful work for example the multicoloured fish shown below. She developed advanced skills in thread painting and won one of our competitions with her pansy piece winning. Rowan also hand embellished her wedding dress which she later converted to a tunic.

Rowan is influenced by pagan practice and the mother goddess and showed us beautiful examples of her interpretations of this as pictured below. In common with Janette she also cited inspiration and support from BETA, including a recent wet felting workshop. She used her felted piece to make a base for a stitching, inspired by African tribal art. Rowan mentioned particular inspiration from Margaret Richards for this piece but more generally extended this to all the BETA members. BETA members are of course also inspired by both of tonight’s speakers and the work they shared with us.

We had our usual raffle this evening for beautiful stitched bags made this month by Bev (the big bag) and Brenda the small bag

Dee also introduced our group based piece which will be based on our favourite books with each of us making a stitched book spine, to be displayed on a stitched book shelf. Further instructions will be sent out very soon including dimensions for the each spine. The completed piece with all of our contributions should look amazing. Our meeting is being held on zoom, with a speaker from the William Morris Society, talking about May Morris. A Zoom meeting means we don’t have to go out in the worst of the weather and allows to have a speaker we couldn’t otherwise access because of distance or cost.

Our next face to face meeting is on 10th March, with member led activities: cold water dyeing led by Rowan and colour from flower petals, led by Jane. More chance for us all to be inspired by others. The raffle colour is orange.