#SeptTextileLove

The #SeptTextileLove challenge is back!

It’s an Instagram challenge all about engaging with other textile makers, designers, artists and enthusiasts, and sharing a collective love of textiles. There are 30 prompts, one for each day in September, which use the hashtag #SeptTextileLove. You can respond to as many of the prompts as you wish, this could be only a few or it may be all of them. The only requirement is that you include the hashtag #SeptTextileLove so the seam textile collective can find, like, comment on and share your posts!

September is the perfect time to do this as everyone is invigorated after the summer break, maybe with a few new goals and aspirations if you associate this time of year with the start of the academic year.

The full list of prompts will be shared on the seam collective Instagram page and on the seam blog on Friday 31 August. I’ll be joining in, I look forward to seeing your posts and sharing your love of textiles during September!

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Creative Bath Awards

The seam textile collective decided, days before the deadline, to enter the first ever Creative Bath Awards. We’re a creative group, we’ve had a successful run with our shiftWorks project and we’re based in Bath – a perfect fit!

We hurriedly put together an application (luckily we’d recently reported on our project success so had many facts and figures to hand to help) and reviewed it together, made changes, reviewed it again and eventually hit the submit button with minutes to spare.

A number of weeks later (yes, they made us wait that long!) we received a much hoped for email confirming we’d been shortlisted as finalists in the Creative Bath Awards! We were over the moon and quickly signed up to attend the finalists’ drinks reception and the awards ceremony itself.

The awards ceremony was part of the Creative Bath Summer Party and showed off Bath’s creativity at its best – there was live entertainment, art, body and face painting, fire displays (this was a particular favourite of mine), a balloon installation, Morris dancers, buskers and more.

In amongst all of this frivolity there was a marquee which held all of the finalists, the sponsors and the judges along with some rather entertaining hosts. It was fantastic to hear more about each of the entrants as the winners were announced and the acceptance speeches made. Unfortunately we weren’t successful on the night, and the (very deserving) Bath Cake Company came away with the ‘maker’ award. We had a brilliant evening though and would recommend it to any creative maker, whether your work is craft, digital, traditional or contemporary there’s a category to suit you. We’re already looking forward to next year’s awards!

Bath Knitting & Crochet Guild – Crochet with Karina

This month we were lucky enough to have Karina back, by popular demand, to lead a beginners and improvers session with the Bath Knitting & Crochet Guild. Since her last session we’ve had a number of new joiners to the group, and many of the beginners from the first session were now ready to move on to new techniques and more difficult makes.

Karina and her glamorous assistant PJ took small groups of people through the different steps of starting out, how to make your first chain and what you do with this, through to increasing, decreasing and making a sphere. Everyone had a great time with many participants going from being a complete beginner to finishing their first granny square!

 

If you weren’t able to attend the session, you can access the ‘how to crochet’ guide from the Knitting & Crochet Guild here, and there are always people on hand at our monthly sessions to show you ‘how to’ and to answer any queries you have.

The next session of the Bath Knitting & Crochet Guild will be on Saturday 10 June from 10am to midday. We’ll be at the Boston Tea Party on Alfred Street to celebrate World Wide Knit in Public Day and the second birthday of the Bath Knitting & Crochet Guild – we look forward to seeing you there!