Extrav-Organza!

May's workshop was a lovely stitching, slashing, burning day with Kathleen Laurel Sage!

Kathleen is well known for her floral organza designs, and also her innovative use of materials to create panels, bags, jewellery and 3D items.

Following a packed talk, illustrated with lots of examples and slides the previous evening, that led us through Kathleen's many-stage transition from hand embroidery to the design and development of her distinctive machine-embroidered floral work, we were treated to a fairly intensive day producing our own panels.  

While some people preferred to create their own designs, Kathleen's ready-prepared kits took away a lot of the uncertainty - and for some of us, time spent dithering!  The kits are beautifully assembled with all the materials, design, instructions, process diagram and reference photo, and enabled those using them to really focus on the stitching and creating, and to complete a panel during the day.

These lovely lacy designs use organza fabrics trapped between layers of dissolvable film, which are machine embroidered and then cut back, and finally cut out with a soldering iron.  The whole process gave us a thorough understanding of the techniques Kathleen uses and the confidence to apply them to our own designs.

Kathleen is a friendly, relaxed, helpful tutor.  She is also well organised and made sure we kept to a pretty strict timetable to ensure that we got through all the stages and had a super panel to take away at the end of the day.