Withy Arts’ new project, Catching the Memories and Passing on the Skills, funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, has just started. One of the aims of this year long project is to teach participants the skills of basket making which were so important to Great Yarmouth’s past. The fishing industry used baskets in great quantities until plastic took over and for this reason, Great Yarmouth was a place of skilled craftsmanship.
For the first few weeks participants have been learning the basics of weaving in both willow and cane and in the process, made some beautiful objects, pictured below.
Tension plates featuring the rosebud knotMaking a tension plateLovely trays
We’ve got to the point where we are all making creative decisions about how our coast-inspired pieces are going to look. Working on our separate canvasses whilst sharing the space is delightful.
We settled down to stitching on the sewing plates we made last week. We achieved that lovely state where we were stitching together in companionable silence.
Katie stitching…
…her work
Keara stitching…
…her work
We also made some new plates for future weeks which we left to dry on the shelf.
We used the prints and rubbings we made last time and other fabrics to create ‘plates’ for sewing onto in future sessions. We ripped the fabrics and arranged them how we liked them and stuck them down.
While they were drying we had a go at Free Stitching, Free Stitching means you can put your stitches anywhere you like, so you can make patterns if you want to, but you can also do something less fixed, even chaotic.
Katie stitching. She decided afterwards that these shapes looked like fish.
