Today everyone who had been in last week came back which was great! The new room set up worked a lot better and the session was a lot calmer as a result.
At the start of the session I introduced and showed photos of my work and past projects and then I showed images of contemporary embroidery work.
I showed images of samplers, old and new, and talked about the history of them and what important social records they have become. I talked about the samplers that I will be making alongside the project and how I would like the group to make a mini sampler each and how we will be starting them next week.
I had made up 3 postcards for each person with the following questions on them:
- Describe your pregnancy in 3 words
- What do you love about being a mum? What has surprised you? What do you find hard?
- If you could give one piece of advice to pregnant women or new mums what would it be?
The idea of the questions is to provide ideas for a word or phrase that the group can choose to stitch into their mini samplers next week. We talked about the questions around the table, they prompted good conversations.
We worked on chain stitch, fly stitch and wheat ear stitch.
We talked about our jobs, schools now and when we were there. About how dad's get to come home and be 'the fun one' and get the kids all hyped up (everyone agreed on this point!), we started talking about our birth stories at the end.