Yorkshire & Humber Embroidery Group (YHEG) Summer School - July 2026

 

My finished piece from Rebekah Johnstone's workshop

Every year the Yorkshire & Humber Embroiderers' Group (YHEG) organise a residential Summer School at Bishop Burton College near Beverley, East Yorkshire. It is a two and a half day stitching extravaganza. There are 4 workshop streams to choose from.  This year's tutors were:

Rebekah Johnston - The Fabric of Home

Toni Buckby - Introduction to Historic Blackwork Embroidery 

Rachael Singleton - Re-Imagined

Kate Slaughter  - Waxing Lyrical with Colour and Print

I am a member of YHEG but this is the first year I have been to Summer School. I took Rebekah Johnstone's workshop.

Examples of Rebekah Johnstone's work

Rebekah is a Nottingham based textile artist working with repurposed domestic fabrics and natural dyes to create quilts and textile pieces rooted in memory, resilience and a sense of home. Her practice combines hand-stitching, needle-turn and raw edged applique, boro inspired mending, darning methods, distressing fabrics as well as quilt construction and binding methods.

Rebekah's natural dyed fabric & threads & commercial threads for us to use 

Rebekah’s workshop was inspired by her quilt project “The Fabric of Home”, which explored the meaning of home through cloth, memory, and repair. Images of the quilt and examples of her work were at the summer school to introduce the theme and activities of the weekend.

 Some of the participants' work from Rebecca Johnstone's workshop

My piece (see top photo) was based on a repeating theme of a window in my house.

At the end of the weekend everyone lays their work out and we get a chance to go round and see what everyone has done in the different workshops. As a bit of background here's a little about the other tutors and what each workshop offered, taken from the Summer School info...

Toni Buckby is a Sheffield based artist working with traditional textile techniques, experimental digital/electronics, and acts of collective making. Her work explores ideas of skilled practice, the value of labour, the visibility of authorship, and the creation and accessibility of practical knowledge. Specialising in fine hand embroidery, Toni is currently undertaking a PhD with Sheffield Hallam University and the Victoria & Albert Museum, investigating how fine art practice can be used to reconstruct, interpret, and present fragile and inaccessible Blackwork embroideries.

The summer school project consisted of one of Toni's Historic Blackwork Kits with pre-printed fabric, embroidery threads and needles.

Some of the participants' work from Toni Buckby's workshop

Rachael Singleton is an experimental textile and mixed media artist living in South Yorkshire. Her work brings together creative thought and practical engagement with a variety of materials. Layering forms her signature process through the employment of varied materials in order to make her ideas come to life.  She is greatly inspired by the natural world which is a constant source of enchantment and she is also deeply interested in containment. 

Working with a well known favourite painting, students ‘mined’ their images of it for various visual elements, collecting a bank of patterns to translate onto cloth. The aim was to create a range of fabrics that could be reconstructed into abstracted designs by either hand or machine stitching.

Some of the participants' work from Rachael Singleton's workshop

Kate Slaughter is a textile artist, dyer, and tutor who takes inspiration from the beautiful flowers and landscapes of Northumberland and Cumbria. She creates hand painted yarns and threads in a range of colours, adding unique texture and character to her designs.

Kate's workshop taught students how to transform plain fabrics with surface decorative techniques including wax crayons, bondaweb, inktense ink blocks, transfer paints and wooden printing blocks. Participants were also encouraged to add additional surface decoration using simple hand embroidery with a range of different threads and yarns. 

Some of the participants' work from Kate Slaughter's workshop

Kate also had some very colourful threads and kits for sale...

Kate Slaughter's Kits & Threads 

It was a great weekend.  Apart from the luxury of two and a half days stitching with like minded souls there was good food (Yorkshire portions), a super walled garden and pleasant accommodation.  Thank you to Pauline, the YHEG organisers and tutors.

It was the heatwave weekend so it was very warm.  Afterwards I took myself off to Bridlington for a swim and an ice cream...

Bridlington South Beach

Refreshment after a swim

Stitched Coffee Pod Flower Collage Workshop

My Stitched Coffee Pod Flower Collages

This weekend I visited the Quilters' Guild Contemporary Textiles group Region 14 (Cleveland & Yorkshire) to lead a workshop for them entitled Stitched Coffee Pod Flower Collage Workshop.  The aim was to show how used coffee pods could be manipulated into some basic flower shapes which, with a bit of design work, could then be turned into a stitched collage. You can see some of my examples above.

Coffee pods, prepped and ready to use

I had prepped plenty of coffee pods for everyone to use in a whole array of colours.  All the coffee grounds I had removed from them been added to my garden compost! And there were plenty of threads, buttons and beads available too...

Threads, buttons & beads

Coffee pods sorted by colour

And after some coffee pod manipulation demonstrations, everyone got going...

Workshop participants flower shapes in the making

Some great new ideas emerged from cutting, hammering and the use of pliers.

At the end of the day, some fabulous collages had been created.  One Young Quilter, had been particularly imaginative to great effect...

Here is the fabulous work of the other participants...

I was really impressed with everyone's ideas and creativity - what a super group!  Thank you Contemporary Textiles for inviting me along.

UNmaking - Textile Study Group - Constance Howard Gallery, London

Constance Howard and her unfinished piece The Second Lady

 

Earlier this year I went to see UNmaking - An Exhibition of Process & Practice by the Textile Study Group at the Constance Howard Gallery, Deptford Town Hall, London. Constance Howard, textile artist, embroiderer and teacher, was instrumental in establishing the Textile Study Group.  Set up in 1973, it was originally a support group for embroidery teachers under her guidance.  Now it is a group of international textile artists with innovative approaches to their art and teaching.

The exhibition starts from the premise that the embodied nature of making means that the making process is often taken for granted.  Here the Group are looking to question this through the deconstruction process, ultimately to inform the development of their work, why they make and what makes a finished piece.

Here are some of the pieces on show...

Sian Martin - Conserve and Recover: the story of peat

Here Sian Martin has pulled fabric apart either partly or completely with a view to remaking it into something new. She sees this deconstruction of fabric as echoing the breaking down of organic matter to form peat - a new form with many beneficial characteristics.

Alice Blackstock - Deconstructed Left Sleeve

Alice Blackstock's deconstruction of a shirt has given her a new appreciation of the processes involved in its construction.

Alice Fox - Nest

Alice Fox deconstructed an abandoned nest found on her allotment.  In so doing she was able to identify the materials that she could reuse in this work.

Dorothy Tucker - And then...

Dorothy Tucker started by cutting up leek heads, examining and drawing them which led to this stitched work.

Gillian Cooper - Manes

The Manes in Ancient Rome were deities formed from the souls of deceased loved ones.  This idea is used here by Gillian Cooper. Scraps from a long ago projects are brought together in a new piece which becomes a shrine to those initial works.

Janet Edmonds - The hardest thing of all is to see what is really there...

Inspired by the routes we follow - roads, railways, paths - Janet Edmonds has made a series of grids that she has turned into 3D forms.  She sees these as representing our complex paths through life.

Sarah Burgess - Sweet Dreams Were Made Of This...

Sarah Burgess's pillowcase, printed with cyanotypes and lithography and stitched, represents the dreams that unravel and evaporate as we wake, departing until we go back to bed and dream again.

Shelley Rhodes - Kerkyra Cloth

Shelley Rhodes made this piece from a scarf that she found while out walking.  It has been deconstructed, cut up, stained, painted, abraded and put back together with patches and stitching in a Japanese Boro-like manner.

Gwen Hedley - Reconstructed

Here Gwen Hedley has deconstructed an old book and, using only the materials and processes used making the original book, she has reconstructed a new work of collage.

Although this exhibition has now finished in London, it reopens at Museum in the Park, Stroud GL5 4AF from 12 September – 8 November 2026.  Go see...

Prism Textiles - Dictionary Exhibition - London - April 2026

Ross Belton - Vessel
Representing the concept of containment, transport and the relationship between container and contents across cultures

 

The annual Prism Textiles exhibition at the Art Pavilion, Mile End, London is one of the highlights of my textile year.  Not only is the venue fantastic and beautifully located, the textile work is varied and interesting and there are free workshops.  This year the theme was Dictionary - interpreted in multiple ways by members of the group.  A challenge this year for visitors was the tube strike, which was in force on the two occasions when I visited.   However, using the Santander bikes for hire solved the problem for us, although the cycling was a bit hairy until we discovered (only on the final journey, unfortunately) that we could make almost the entire journey along the Regent's Canal! 

Prism tells us that this year's exhibition "explores the hidden meanings embedded in words: their origins, their shifting forms across centuries, misunderstandings, transformations, and cultural echoes."

Here I show a few personal favourites from the exhibition.

Judith Rowley - C is for Colour
Natural fabrics and fibres with hand and machine stitch
Sometimes a dictionary definition isn't enough, colour has to be seen to be appreciated.

Jane Riley - The dictionary of infinite revision
Wood, wool, linen, cotton, silk, woollen blanket, plastic and cardboard
A physical dictionary is obsolete as we embrace a digital future.  The Pink Paint seaweed encrusting the cover of this dictionary also faces extinction with rising ocean temperatures and acidification.

Jill Walker - Florilegium I
Cyanotype, stitch & gathered materials
A language rooted in materials rather than words

Maria Walker - Women's words
Preloved jacket, felt, thread, words
A dictionary of synonyms for women sewn onto a jacket
There are many derogatory terms for women in dictionaries written by the established patriarchy who dominated literature and language for many years

Annie Taylor - List, Less, Listless
Textile scraps, thread
The artist cannot work without a list so being listless represents having nothing to do.  If it's not written down, it can't be done.

Jeryl Church - The Twisting of the Truth
Tissuetex, ink, papers, konnyaku paste, paper yarn, linen thread
Represents the manipulation of words to promote false narratives and disinformation

Helen O'Leary - Treasure 1
Mixed materials, textiles, stitch, knitted wire
"Treasure" as babies' bootees 

Marilyn Hall - A tin ticket and a small bag
Used natural cloths, indigo dye, linen thread
Minor misdemeanours by women in 19th century Britain could lead to deportation.  They carried an identity tag and a bag of fabric scraps that they could stitch into items to sell.

Julie Turner - Grief: noun: as in distress caused by loss
Rust, heat press print, plant material, plant dyed fabric, wax
Made in response to the deaths of refugees crossing the channel

I also took a Stitched Textile Vessels workshop with Maria Walker... 

Maria Walker - An empty vessel makes the most noise
Cloth, thread
Work exploring the word "vessel" from a feminist context

Maria Walker's Example Stitched Textile Vessels

My Stitched Vessel - A Work in Progress

and a Scrappy Dolls Workshop with Annie Taylor...  

My Scrappy Doll

Both workshops were great fun and informative.  You can see their work and my works in progress above. 

I hope that gives you a flavour of the varied and fabulous works that were on display. The exhibition has finished now so you can't visit but do keep it in mind for next year. Also, a shout out to The Coffee Room, which is the closest cafe to the Art Pavilion.  Who knew red velvet doughnuts could be so good!