Slack Space Colchester Leading a Group

Last Thursday was my first time leading a group of artists at Slack Space.  Suffered dreadfully from nerves most of the day, but as soon as we started in the evening I was fairly OK. Its been a long time since I did anything like this.

Pam's' design with some of Julies lovely paste paper.

We were concentrating on stitching on paper, but used fabric too. I took lots of my stash of paper, vintage magazines and books. Slack Space provided fabric, trimmings and Paula brought her machine. My machine had decided to have an off day, I've now found it was a loose wire in the plug - thankfully I managed to mend it myself. Franklins also lent us two Juki machines - the top of that range - so even more nerves as I had only had one 1/2 hour lesson, two months ago.

Linda and Cherry programming a Juki machine.

Two ladies brought their own machines, thank goodness, as we had 15 ladies turn up, Paula tells me this is a record number!!

At first it was pretty quiet as everyone was sorting through the mass of materials, then one machine started and they were off on a creative journey. Queues gathered at the Juki machines, lots of new stitches and quite easy to use, once we got the bobbins to wind with some help from Pam. Once people had started to use these Juki machines it was pretty hard to get them off the machines!!!

I was knocked out that so many of my friends had turned up, my neighbour Pam and Julia from the Baptist Church in Bures, my arty friends from the Wednesday group, Julie, Linda and Cherry, thank you I really appreciated your support.

Miss Molly came along as well and went round greeting every one, she even managed to sneak a sit on a lap or two. We had tea or coffee at the end of the evening and I had taken a pack of digestives along. These were packed carefully at the end of the evening and loaded into the car. Molly was loaded too and sat quietly, whilst I chatted to my friends, eating as many of the biscuits as she could. I only realized next day when I unpacked and found the top biscuit was very soggy, she had been licking that  one as she was unable to get it out of the pack :-)

It was amazing to see how many different designs every one made. I do hope we can have a monthly get together at Slack Space starting in September. I will have to see if I can persuade Frankilins to loan or hire me the machines on a regular basis :-)