Embroiderers Unite!

 This Saturday our branch of The Embroiderers' Guild was hosting the Regional Day in Wombourne, Staffordshire. I am a new member and was interested to see how it would be.
There was the usual reports and business dealings first, and considering the temptations that awaited us we were all very well behaved through all of that.
As soon as that was over it was flies round a honey pot time. Three hundred women clamouring around the Traders' Stalls eager to get their hands on metal shim, paper sculpy, silk fibres and cloths, felts in all  the colours of the rainbow and those in between, transfoils, threads of every sort, fabrics, dyes, paints, stamps and scores of other goodies to feed the addiction so many of us hide have.
Later, after lunch, the guest speaker was Maggie Grey, who delivered a delightful talk on Walls and Frescoes.

She presented a slide show combining her travels, inspirations and resulting work in mixed media and textiles. It was both fascinating and entertaining. She mixed humour and information brilliantly and explained some of her ways of translating images into stitch.
I have a couple of her books and have long admired her as a lead in her field and what I have seen of her Workshop on The Web has been inspiring.
I love the image of Che Guevara with a poodle she has produced -  she says, "I thought he needed a poodle to bring him down a peg or two." That really made me chuckle!
She also brought a lot of her work along so that we could see it up close and dare I say, touch some of it (irresistible).

After all of this were the awards. To complement the Maggie Grey talk was a competition entitled "Fragments and Frescoes". I had entered a piece, really in order to support our branch of the Guild and to help create a reasonable sized exhibition.
Here it is "Arborist's Fragments" (A3 size as specified):

Well I was so surprised and amazed that it won 3rd Prize! Wow! I've never entered a competition before - never had the courage! Anyway I was very pleased with my certificate and a lovely big box of Anchor machine threads, perles, embroidery threads, needles and such like. I still can't believe that Maggie Grey judged it as she did. Purr, purr.
I think I might have another go next year!!