Mr X Stitch » Curegreed’s Adventures

Curegreed’s Adventure – I’m Stumped

Curegreed — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:30:09 +0000

Hullo! I’m Curegreed, and every third Friday of the month I’ll be telling you all about what goes on at the degree in The Royal School of Needlework. I’m a student and I’ll be sharing as I’m going. It’s nothing official, but Mr X Stitch thought it’d be interesting. Here goes nothing!
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I’m in my second year now at the School. It’s definitely different – but I think the school as a whole is different and not just because it’s second year. Last year was the first year the course has ever run so they used our criticisms to make it better and things, so this year- it’s a better course! Which bodes well for the future, obviously.

The second year feels a lot freer. We are ourselves, to choose our own pathways and to make our own mistakes. It’s also a lot more jam-packed apparently. We have been ‘back at school’ for just over three weeks now. We have finished learning Raised work (stumpwork) and are 2/3 of the way through ‘Advanced Gold’. Seriously. You can imagine how stressed I am. Between working for my grades, working for money and having enough fun (so that living makes sense) I am spent. And that is why I’m going to have to take a step back with these posts. I don’t want to say it’s the end but I have found myself recently being totally unreliable. Both to friends and other commitments. I am going to try and find a first year to continue with my posting. Now that the school is totally different it won’t be like a repeat of last year at all. It’s been fun, but with a heavy heart I’m going to have to say a ‘So-long!’ (but I will see you again, y’understand.)

Let me leave you with what I have done in these past three weeks:
Gavin Fry, remember him? He came back to teach us Raised Work. This was contemporary, this was like nothing else the RSN has ever seen before. We stitched with metre long thread and we tied knots in those threads and we did what we liked. The size of the stitch? Who cares! The style of the stitch? Whatever! Just do it. It was like a super fun stitchy version of Blue Peter. I had a whale of a time. I embroidered around a little mechanical donkey, and then I painted on those stitches and made him into a bull. *GASP* And so, I shall charge out of here with the same gusto that I came in with:

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If you want to see my other work then my personal blog is a pretty good place to start: My Little Stitches
If you want to know more, please get in touch! You can email me at: prettyguns.rosa[at]gmail.com

Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Holiday – Vintage at Goodwood

Curegreed — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:02:31 +0000

Hullo! I’m Curegreed, and every third Friday of the month I’m supposed to be telling you all about what goes on at the degree in The Royal School of Needlework. However I’m on my holidays now, so from here until September the posts’ll be varied and (hopefully) interesting. Here goes nothing!
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Last weekend Mr X Stitch, Jess of Bright Star fame and I helped out Fine Cell Work by putting on a Cross Stitching Workshop in their name at the new festival Vintage at Goodwood.

This mainly consisted of us girls wearing nice dresses and Mr X Stitch pulling this face a lot:

We taught people of all ages and all sexes and they all managed to produce a nice little thing- from a child stitching ‘Bowie’ to a hot girl stitching ‘Ruby’ which was her erotic pen name. Takes all sorts.

We helped raise the profile of Fine Cell Work and we all had a great day. Hoping to go back next year!

photos by the world famous Jessica Aldred

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Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure – The New Black

Curegreed — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:00:15 +0000

It’s our last project of the year- and it appears to be our heaviest. There were no smiles when that timetable was given out, I tell you now.
However there is a marked change- we’ve been offered freedom from stitch. No longer do we have to give in singular final pieces, a range of samples is OK. No longer do we have to use stitch for our final outcome- simply something inspired and informed by stitch is OK too.

The stitch that we have to be informed by is Blackwork. Oh what I’ve learnt of Blackwork! I had no idea it was all tonal- those background patterns? They’re supposed to fade from dark to light! Either by adding/taking away shapes or by changing the thickness of the thread. I literally had no idea. You’re probably laughing at me for this, but we’ve all got to learn.

For Blackwork we found ourself looking at a lot of old paintings in Portraiture Museums. You know the sort- Elizabeth I with her big leg-of-mutton sleeves and her sceptre, men looking fiercely into your eyes whilst trying to ignore their fluffy collars. That’s because that’s where all the true Blackwork designs are! And none enamoured a bud and I more than The Cholmondeley Sisters. And so, for a side project, we made a ‘cover version’ of it.

And boom! We got ourselves a Blackwork Project. The RSN is no longer all Tudor Roses and dogs on cushions.

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If you want to see my other work then my personal blog is a pretty good place to start: My Little Stitches
If you want to know more, please get in touch! You can email me at: prettyguns.rosa[at]gmail.com

Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure – Kits and Giggles

Curegreed — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:00:32 +0000

Due to the Easter Holidays appearing in the middle of this unit, Contemporary Applications (AKA Kit making) is *still* going on. It’s been a very odd unit compared to usual- all business and research, less creativity than we’re used to, but it’s nice to rein it in every now and again.

I have been using this unit to my full, unadulterated advantage, I will not lie. I chose to explore craftivist kits, which basically means I can chat to my pals and call it work. Be it via email to Rayna at Radical Cross Stitch, or over a cup of tea and some stitch with Sarah and the other kidz of The Craftivist Collective, I’m workin’ hard! That’s the beauty of doing a course in something that is so integral to your life anyway- you can mould it to suit you and play to your strengths. Sure, I’ve been working hard to create a pattern, brand and identity of my own, but it fits into everything else. I’m not in a position yet to show you how far I’ve come, so instead you may have some pictures of the fun that The London Craftivist Collective and I have been having.

I made some patterns (as far as the RSN are concerned, they are practices for my final outcome… Capsice?) for the Craftivist Collective’s current campaign – trying to encourage people to vote in the upcoming UK election. You can see one being practiced by a first time stitcher in the above photograph, and to stitch your own you should go to The Craftivist Collective’s site.
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If you want to see my other work then my personal blog is a pretty good place to start: My Little Stitches
If you want to know more, please get in touch! You can email me at: prettyguns.rosa[at]gmail.com

Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure – Kits and Ass

Curegreed — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:00:19 +0000

This month, we’ve got something rather different on… It’s our business module! Named ‘contemporary applications’ it is a five week programme designed to show us how to make money from this bizarre little craft we’re learning. And how are they teaching us to do that? With kits! Our task is to design a counted stitch design for a particular market. We may choose whichever market we like, provided we do our research into that market and attempt to make a commercial product.

Emily Peacock comes in three times a week to talk us through the process of becoming a kit making goddess, we’ve also had lectures from experts in bespoke to order kit making from none other than The Royal School of Needlework, and essentially we just get to play around with some simple cross stitch. It’s like a dream! I’m finally getting round to stitching up all the craft kits from Radical Cross Stitch I’ve been meaning to forever, and now I can call it work! May these five weeks stretch on forever.

Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure: Goldwork & Gavin Fry

Curegreed — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:00:45 +0000

So this month it’s goldwork! I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of it… It consists mostly of laid work and what I like about embroidery is the fact that the decorative threads become part of the fabric, not the case here. I also like how most embroidery can be done fairly cheaply, which obviously doesn’t apply when it comes to stitching with gold. However, it’s still learning skills and is still fun and exciting!

Alongside the stitch, we’ve had a fair few visiting artists talks. We’ve had them all along, sure, but this month we’ve had some really good ones. We’re currently working with artist Kirstie MacLeod, so she’s been around a lot and she’s a wonderful influence on us. But I wanted to talk to you mostly about Gavin Fry. He visited last week and was wonderful. Whereas past visitors have given a brief presentation of their work, he gave us a presentation on work made by both he and others that he thought would help us with our current project (for which the theme is identity). He also brought in his own work so we could handle it, created booklets for us, gave us postcards of his work and took the time to have one to one tuition sessions with each of us. He really put in an effort for us and it felt great to be treated with such respect. Not only that, as I’m sure you all saw yesterday, his work is brilliant and he’s a nice guy! It was a truly excellent experience for all of us. That’s something that we wouldn’t get anywhere else. For as much as artists do come to degree courses and give talks, in bigger institutions there just isn’t the time to concentrate on each of the students, and you’d be lucky anywhere else to get time to talk to the artist. Not at the Royal School of Needlework. Everyone is a VIP. I am very grateful for my chance to study there.

Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure – Needle Painting the Town Red

Curegreed — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:00:29 +0000

So our current project is ‘Painting with a needle’, AKA Silk Shading. The very prospect of this filled us newbie stitchers with dread. The margin for error had shrunk dramatically, this was no longer Jacobean crewel work with its nice big crude stitches and little attention to reality, this wasn’t canvas work with it’s safety net of “provided you counted properly, you’ll be fine.” This was silk shading. Our stitched pieces had to look as the object would look in real life. The lighting had to be correct, the colours had to flow into one another, it had to be spot on.

Anne Butcher was brought in for our technical stitch lessons. And as teachers should, she taught us not to be so scared of it. She gave us hints and tips until we’d gained enough courage to try, which is the hardest step. Once you’ve started trying and you’re not scared to fail, it’ll be ok, eventually. So the entire project has been based on two stitches- split stitch and long and short stitch. Split stitch outlines, long and short fill and cover the split stitch. It’s best to remember long and short as ‘long and longer’. Short stitches have no place in colour blending. Work back into the work, work on top, stitch, stitch, stitch. Add more stitches. Put in enough stitches so it just becomes a mass and no individual stitches can be picked out. It’s not regimented, it’s random. It’s trial and error. It’s silk shading.

So, days of work, and what do you end up with?

A leaf with a turnover. *sigh*

See you next time for stories of …Goldwork!

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Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure – So Crewel

Curegreed — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:00:33 +0000

So, to begin! In my last post I told you about canvas work, and I showed you my stitch sampler. Well here is my individual outcome- a piece of embroidered braille, using the warp and weft threads of the scrim as my stitching threads. It’s not a photogenic piece, but the brief was ‘texture’ so I don’t lose points for ugliness.

We’ve now been working on Jacobean Crewelwork for four weeks- crewel work being embroidery worked with wools, and ‘jacobean’ being the visual style. The contextual studies lessons we’re getting are really interesting. The lecturer, Lynn Hulse, is a fountain of embroidery knowledge, and we also get to visit the RSN studios and the collection to see examples of the embroideries we’re being told about during the lectures. On Tuesday, we saw meters of late eighteenth century embroideries designed by William Morris and Burne Jones based on the story ‘The Romance of The Rose’.

I’m really enjoying Jacobean Crewelwork, as most of the others on the course are. Here’s a picture of my stitch sampler in progress, just to give you an idea-

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Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure – Canvassing to save my reputation

Curegreed — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:00:37 +0000

I am now four weeks into the course, and we’re already coming to the end of the canvas work project- it’s not a course for slackers. The way the embroidery units are divided up is that we have five weeks on each style (e.g canvas work, crewel work), the first three weeks of which are spent on learning the ins and outs of the technical stitches necessary, then the last two weeks are when we get to unleash our creativity.

We’ve learnt more canvas stitches than I expect I could ever remember. We’ve also learnt how to frame up on slate frames which makes me feel like I’m doing ‘proper embroidery’… It’s all very exciting.

Here are my three weeks worth of stitches:

I could talk to you about the RSN forever, I really could. But I wouldn’t want to bore you, so for now I’ll simply show you some more photographs of my stitching- and next time we’ll talk, I’ll fill you in on crewel work gossip.

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Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?

Curegreed’s Adventure… – The beginning of something big

Curegreed — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:00:30 +0000

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You should see it – the look on people’s face when you tell them you’re going to study at Hampton Court Palace. People don’t really know what to say. They are then bewildered further when I tell them it’s to do Hand Embroidery at The Royal School of Needlework. But of course a young girl with a bull ring, bleach blonde hair and doc martens can’t be into needlepoint? And have been accepted to study at RSN…? No, surely not? But I am. And I’m just as surprised as they are.

It’s not as impressive as it sounds. I applied simply through UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) with a personal statement attempting to sell myself, and then attended a 20 minute interview in which I showed off my portfolio (full of embroidered pictures of cunts and racists, since you ask) and tried to impress with my charm and wit. And it worked; I began my studies on the 14^th September.

For now, since we’ve not got our teeth stuck into anything too major, I’ll simply show you the view from the classroom window:

Jealous?

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Disclaimer: Curegreed’s view do not necessarily represent those of the Royal School of Needlework, and she’s not pretending they do. Okay?