Long Stitch

November 2017

We welcomed Maisie, a new visitor who brought some lovely books to show us, and Heather from the Marches Book Artists to the meeting, and said our goodbyes to Carole, who is moving to Norfolk. All good wishes for the future go with her, and we gave her a small star book filled with messages for her new life.  Carole taught us a new word - 'ambigram'. This is a word that can be be read from back to front or upside down and still retain its meaning.

We have two probable exhibitions next year- 'Frankenstein ' for the Liverpool Book Arts Fair  exhibition  in July  and Botanic garden-related books for Croxteth in August. A meeting of the Croxteth garden society on the evening of November 16th will give some background to this opportunity-please let Brenda know if you’d like to go. (via Marilyn). Also a possible tie in with the Endeavour (Cpt Cook and Joseph Banks) exhibition.
(megonline.co.uk./Endeavour)   for more information.

We have time to think of ideas and books for these events.

 

Elizabeth Willow, Liverpool based artist and known to many of us, gave a very detailed and considered explanation of long stitching, a useful binding technique which stitches the signatures to the binding with no glue used. In our session we almost managed to get the stitching completed. This is a complex binding to get your head around but Elizabeth made it look as easy as possible, and accommodated her pace to ours. Big thanks to Elizabeth for a very inspirational session. Paper provided was a 140gsm Zerkall paper, card for a cover, and threads were single strand embroidery cord, better than multi stranded cord for this stitch. We noted that graph paper makes working out the stitch patterns much easier, or use musical stave paper. It’s a good idea to use different colour pens for the different stitch patterns on your grid.