12 July 2025
We gathered in a hot day in July (grateful for the effective fans in our venue!) to share another day of fabric fun.
Our first session was the revealing of our earlier challenge to produce a piece of work based on the theme ‘Close to Home’ – a piece with a sense of place. As always, it was exciting to see how fabulous and how diverse our members’ response to this challenge was. Many of these pieces will be shown at our upcoming exhibition at Denbies in Dorking in January 2026.
But then we turned to the main event of the day – learning paper and fabric bead making. This was expertly led by Jenny Parker, who brought a large array of samples to demonstrate with.
Before lunch we had fun playing with the paper bead process. Encouraged by our success, after lunch (and the raffle), we began playing with fabrics. This turned out to be a little trickier than the paper beads. Nevertheless, Jenny’s patience and encouragement meant we all took home beads of both varieties. Some were colourful, others embellished with sparkly threads and sequins, and others stylishly monochrome.
Thoughts turned to how to use our new beads. Some members had plans of textile embellishments and others already had begun the process of stringing them to create jewellery. Everyone agreed that it had been an interesting day.
Report by Sue Norgrove-Moore