Lucy Harding at Cober Hill, Cloughton, Scarborough

Our stitchy club has a weekend away, with a tutor, each year and this year I went along  : )
Many of you overseas call this kind of gathering together, a 'retreat', which always makes me think of spiritual yoga poses and meditative stitching lol
Well we did the meditative stitching ( and screen printing with the lovely Lucy Harding who was our tutor for the weekend) without the yoga!
Although some of us did raise our arms repetitively at meal times when the bar was open, despite the Rowntrees having been well known Quakers, who of course didn't drink.

We went to Cober Hill which is in Cloughton, just north of Scarborough and is a delightful old building. 
John Wilhelm Rowntree, of the York chocolate family had the idea that there should be a centre where people who worked in education, social service, voluntary and charitable activities could go to have conferences and training.
His cousin Arnold was the one however who in 1920 bought a lovely old Victorian House and provided families and groups with an alternative family holiday venue as well as conference facilities.
He was very keen on adult education and I'm sure the trustees have successfully fulfilled his wishes and groups like our own, are able to stay, hire a workshop room and be well fed whilst there in a charming old house with quite delightful grounds.
A lace making group also stayed last weekend and Cober Hill offer several tutor led craft courses of their own too. We had arranged for the tutor for this weekend after she had given an interesting talk at club for us.
Here's Lucy helping one of our group.

I found this really lovely blog post about Lucy and I couldn't do a
better job, so please nip over to Creative Recycling and see Lucy's
work so beautifully presented, for yourself.
Gosh Lucy, hasn't your hair grown!!
http://www.creativelyrecycling.com/2012/07/lucy-anne-harding.html

Lucy patiently taught us how to screen print and brought screens for us to use and play with. It was really good fun and she actually made up a screen for me from a drawing I had done, which was really kind of her and others used that one too.
The idea was that we could learn to screen print, make a few prints and then she talked us through her technique for appliqueing things onto the screen prints.
Well here's a few members work and honestly there were some fantastic pieces, some of which were virtually completed by sunday afternoon!

From this

                                                    to this!

                                                From this

                                                   to this

                                            and here's some more!

Above is a picture of the flat capped giant statue, that was donated to Scarborough by a lady who bought it because she so loved the seaside resort.
http://www.thescarboroughnews.co.uk/news/sculpture-to-get-thank-you-plaque-1-4056554

 

 

                          Oh Blogger! why this way up? ~#'><

 

 

Okay Blogger is playing up so going to try and split this post!