I know you are all waiting to hear about my grand Day Out with Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn .... so here goes.

It was an absolutely super-wonderful day.

I had been a little bit worried about what they would be like but they were so nice. Good tutors and very giving. I was concerned when I arrived that that there were so many students .. about 30 in all .. and we were split in two rooms but Jan and Jean circulated among the two rooms independently and all went well. I happened to have settled myself in the room that they set their wares out in and when they wanted to talk to everyone the others came into our room to listen. It worked very well.
They had lots of samples to show and they let me take pics but I can't post them I'm afraid.

They handed out little bags of materials they wanted us to use.

We were shown three techniques, all for making textures pieces.
1. Iron some Bondaweb onto background fabric. Iron gold film on top of that... try to make it a broken image... not too solid. At this stage it looks really garish and horrible. Next stage was to do some lacy knitting on big needles (15mm) spread that out onto the Bondaweb and iron it on. Then on top of that build up layers of texture with curonnes, threads etc. Makes a lovely textured piece in the end with that awful gold only glinting through.

2. Another textured piece, this time with irregular knotted buttonhole stitch worked in layer upon layer. Finally do some whipping stitch into this.

3. We used Aquabond which is a water soluble sticky backed fabric. (Barnyarns have it and call it Bond) We taped that down to the table carefully and laid out fancy threads in a grid pattern. The grid doesn't have to be regular. Then fill in the spaces in the grid with something like squares of fabric. Place a sheet of Romeo water soluble on top and press it down to make a sandwich and hold everything in place. At this stage choose whether to machine embroider over it, or hand stitch. We did hand stitching as we didn't take machines. I started with a grid of knotted buttonhole and will work another over that probably. Make sure all the threads in the grid are caught in the top stitching so that they will not fall apart when the sandwich is dissolved.
This will make a lovely lacy piece to add to other work.

This Aquabond was new to me and I think it will be very useful.

We had a super lunch provided by the Regional Chairman and her helpers and it was generally a really nice day. I think Jan and Jean were surprised to find it was a special day for us being the Regional Centenary workshop, so they donated the bags of materials as their contribution, saying that the Guild had been very good to them over the years. We had expected to pay for those so we were all chuffed.
Thoroughly recommend Regional days... at least in our region I have been to three now and they have all been good.

I did take pictures of their samples but didn't ask permission to post them so I can't. Mine are not far enough advanced, but I will show you when they are.

Jean has been doing some wonderful work on her embellisher and I was most impressed with what it can do in the right hands. The samples the company shows in their promotional literature would really put people off buying it I think! I think I might need one. I did ask her what she thought about the cheaper one that is on the market but she didn't recommend it.