Yvonne Brown

Today I've had some time out and spent a very rewarding day in a workshop led by Yvonne Brown at Long Bennington, a village not far from my home town.  I was offered the place at the last minute and I'm really pleased I accepted it as Yvonne had lots of ideas and has sparked my creativity again.  

Our task for the day was to decorate fabric paper to make a book cover and Yvonne had generously prepared all the fabric paper for us in glorious jewel colours.  As ever I found it a bit daunting at first to start designing and working on my piece but with one or two tips from Yvonne I got cracking and was soon lost in combining stitch and beads.

 First of all, the books above are Yvonne's to give us some ideas.

It's very difficult to photograph metallic and irridescent colours but you can see here the wide array of covers made and in the process of being made by the ladies today. 

True to my usual form of working slowly I didn't get mine finished but you can see how far I got above.  It will come as no surprise to see that I kept well within my comfort zone and worked on a gold base with turquoise and orange!  I still have to add another row of beads and sequins on the front (to the right) and I intend to add 2 more rows of blue themed beads to the spine.  The back is decorated with a piece of pale blue metal shim that Carolyn gave me earlier this year with a small rectangle of painted lutradur and another of fused angelina on top.  I had fun using some of the decorative stitches on my machine that I haven't tried before.  You will be able to see from some of the following photographs that several of the ladies managed to finish their bookcovers.

There is so much variety in these covers and the green and gold cover on the right above is really beautiful, having a look of Tudor England about it. 

These two covers are still in their early stages.

As is this one.  The flowers are made by machining small snippets of silk velvet and will eventually have beads added as will the letter 'M'.

More beautiful work and a look at the spine of the Tudor piece at the top of the photo above.

There is no mistaking the work of Tina in the piece at the top above.  You can never have too much colour, or bling!  The cover underneath Tina's is Joan's work and she was infected by Tina's bead enthusiasm (I hope I've attributed that correctly!).  I was delighted to meet Joan as she has been a Follower of this blog for 2 years!  It's lovely to know you're not burbling away to yourself all the time ;-)  Hello Joan!  It was lovely to meet you today and we're sure to meet up before too long at a Guild day.  Joan, if I've put your name to the wrong cover please leave me a quick comment, or a sharp kick! ;-)

This is a quick view of our industrious corner of the room, all hard at work with a cup of tea not far away.  Well, you have to have a cuppa, don't you?  The chocolate biscuits were good too!

We're rapidly getting to the close of voting for the 'Unfolding The Quilts' project which could mean that the Quilt Museum in York will go through to the finals of the National Lottery Awards and at least earn some much deserved publicity if not funding.  If you have already clicked on the link in my side-bar, thank you very much.  If you haven't had chance to vote yet please do click the big blue box on the right and you will be taken to the relevant site to cast your vote.  Or you can click here.  Voting closes at noon on Monday 20 June.  That's the day after tomorrow!

Last but not least, I couldn't resist snapping these little shoppers at the supermarket in the week

Duck a l'orange? ;-))

Have a good week everyone!