To follow on from our meeting thinking about celebrations and decorations, we worked together to make some bunting that will be used as a decoration at Dumpling Day and the Feel Good Family Picnics.
Our Marketing Manager and expert cross-stitcher Katie has been through some of the cross stitch samplers from our collection and used the photographs to reconstruct the pattern. Most of these samplers are around 100 – 150 years old, and many of them were made in schools by young children, they often have a stitched signature with a name and age.
We all selected a pattern and Katie gave us a bunting flag and talked us through the cross stitch process. Some of the group hadn’t tried cross stitch since they themselves were at school. It is a very meditative process and we were all quiet and full of concentration.
To attach our flags to the bunting we were lucky to borrow sewing machines from our collection. Because we have multiples of the same object we can bring these sewing machines out of the archive and put them to practical use. One at a time the Community Curators came up to use the sewing machine, which are very similar to modern sewing machines except that they are operated by manually turning the handle rather than an electric foot. They brought back memories for many of the group of sewing machines that their mothers or grandmothers had used.
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