Grow Your Blog Party 2015

Hello to everyone who visits us because of the wonderful Grow Your Blog Party organised by Vicki of Two Bags Full; thanks to her for the hard work. We are two friends, Maria, living in Dorset and Gilli, from Somerset - both counties in South West England.  We both have a passion for textiles and everything around them.

This is still a very young blog and Maria and I set it up last year but have only just got back to it recently.  Maria is still new to 'blogging' but is getting to grips with it pretty quickly (I'm not surprised - she had a good tutor!)

We are both members of various groups and have been friends for about five years I guess, but really, really good friends for about three to four years; who knows, time just flies!

We meet whenever we can, outside of planned gatherings at the Embroiderers' Guild and West Country Embroiderers, to have P L A Y days.

We have a Facebook Group, which we have called Revise, Refresh, Review and we use it to take another look at various techniques in our vast collection of textile/embroidery/painting/printing/dyeing books. It's good to have a 'second' or maybe 'third' look at various techniques and to try them out again.  An excellent way of stopping yourself from getting stale in your approach to embroidery. There are various plans for this year, but nothing finalised yet except for two holidays booked at Kingcombe, Dorset, using the embellishing machine with Sandra Coleridge - Fantasy Follies and machine embroidery with Alison Holt, Rivers and Waterfalls at Barnstaple, Devon!

We would love to get some followers, so far we have none - we are interesting really you know. Let's hope we make some new friends.

Introductions and Revise, Refresh, Revive Your Embroidery!

Let's introduce ourselves: Gilli in Somerset and Maria in Dorset, UK - two friends who love to Stitch Together!!
We often have play days together, meet at the Embroiderers' Guild branch in Bradford Abbas, West Country Embroiderers in Sherborne and the Embellishing Group in Bishops Caundle. 

Recently we have set up a group on Facebook which we have called Revise, Refresh, Revive and our aim is to work through certain Chapters of books we both own which have been sitting on our bookshelves for too long unused.  

We work through these projects independently at home and it's amazing 'how different the same' can be.

Our first post on our blog shows photos of our work as we revise, refresh and revive our embroidery and textile art. Our first chosen book is the Machine Embroidery Workbook by Val Campbell-Harding and Maggie Grey and we have taken the very simple project in Chapter Two, which calls for bonding of shapes to a background and applying the same to the background with machine straight stitch in the first instance and using the 'utility' stitches on the machine for the second example. This very basic idea has produced some interesting pieces of work and has proved to us the importance of 'reviewing' some of the older books we possess.