The AGM was quickly dealt with at our February meeting and was followed by our speaker Linda Hill, a member of our quilting group. 

Linda gave us a potted history of her life.  She grew up in Yorkshire and at eighteen enrolled at Leicester School of Art and Design.  In Leicester she met her husband and has lived in Leicester since then, other than two short spells living abroad.  Her occupation was in textile art and design.

After she retired a friend, whose mother had died, and knew that she sewed asked her to finish a tumbling block quilt that her mother had half completed.  Her previous experience of sewing was making clothes.

In 2018 a friend, who lives in Australia, contacted her with a proposal to go on a textile and sewing tour of Japan.  This included four workshops for different Japanese techniques, sashiko embroidery, cogin embroidery, shibori dyeing and boro embroidery.  She showed us her workshop pieces and also various examples of these techniques either bought or given to her during the trip.  She also showed us a video of photos that had been taken during the trip.  When she returned she decided that she would make a quilt using sashiko embroidery samples that she had gathered during the trip.  This was displayed on the quilt stand at the back of the stage.  When she had finished that quilt, she started another quilt using boro techniques.  She prefers the boro techniques as they are less precise than sashiko which better suits her style of working.  She then showed us the quilt, which is a work in progress.

Sashiko Quilt

Boro Quilt