Sue Stone at Stitchy Club

My second 'Glorious Hexagon' ( from the 2016 Katja Murak stitch along from The New Hexagon book of hers).
Mind you the colours are dulled on this pic which is a nuisance!

It was stitchy club yesterday and we had Sue Stone visit us with some of her work and she showed us what she has been doing since her last visit to us.
https://womanwithafish.wordpress.com/tag/mixed-media/
 Sue hails from nearby Grimsby and her signature is a fish since her father was in the fishing industry there.
The work she showed us this time featured some really great mixed media, using paint, hand and machine stitching.
Sue says herself she doesn't use many different hand stitches 
but the few simple stitches she does use, are used very cleverly.
Needle weaving, lazy daisy, running, seed and long stitch with some couching, provide some clever texture and effects.
What she calls her 'herring bone' stitches are really effectiv and well worth looking closely at.
 Sue has been using old photographs from hers and her husbands family, recreating them in stitch on backgrounds on which she has also featured graffiti seen in London's East End.
There was she found, a Grimsby Street in the East End and it has a regular turnover of street art, which although much of it gets painted over over time, some of it has been immortalised in Sues work.

 

There is of course only one photo above with graffiti on, but if you chase over to her websites

http://craftscouncil.org.uk/directory/maker/sue-stone/

http://www.womanwithafish.com/Small_Studies.html

I lifted the pic below from her pictures on Google.
She had shown us this one in her presentation and told us that on her wanderings around Grimsby Street in the East End, she stumbled on a dumped armchair.
Walking around the next corner its twin was dumped there also and then a little further, the matching settee( on the right) was dumped too!
As she said, she could have had a 3 piece suite with a spare settee too as it turned out.
So both armchairs and both settees feature in her current work.
The red areas are painted then distressed somewhat, sometimes first then stitched on and sometimes stitched then painted on and sometimes, stitched, painted on the stitches removed, adding another level of texture. Interesting that I thought. 


.The cobblestones are needle weaving.
Below also off Google but shows her stitching really well.


Sue showed us this below too but this is taken from her wordpress blog and is called - 

Girl’s Day Out for Hilda, Nellie and Ida

 I love this one especially and the graffiti is a copy of what she saw in the East End.






 It is worth mentioning that her two sons run a great website, which I have followed for about a year now on Facebook, although I hadn't clocked that they were anything to do with her!

http://www.textileartist.org/10-mixed-media-textile-artists/