Our latest workshop at the Oriental Museum in Durham was centred around the slow stitch movement. This is not, as the title suggests, about sewing slowly, but rather sewing meditatively. The techniques centres around engaging in what is being done rather than the outcome. It is about the motion of creating the stitches and the colour and texture of the fabrics. It is a fantastic wellbeing activity and something that can be done in short amounts of time. Many of us have these projects ready for our tea breaks when we can spend 15 minutes or so taking time out of our busy lives to drink a hot drink and sew.

Slow stitching is environmentally friendly too. Scraps of fabric are all that is needed to create a piece, torn up old clothing, offcuts from other sewing projects, scraps of fabric from a charity shop. These can often become memory pieces as we can see those scraps from our past lives, a favourite shirt that wore out, a scrap of babies' clothing, hand-dyed fabric using plants from a walk or the garden. These can then be embellished using scraps of lace, ribbon, beads and buttons.

For this workshop however, participants were limited to my scraps of fabric from the patchwork quilts I have been making.

• Step 1 is to select the fabrics and "audition them". This means to place the fabrics side by side to see how they work together.
• Step 2 is to arrange the fabrics on the background.
• Step 3 is to stitch all of the fabrics down.
• Step 4 is to embellish with beads, lace or other ephemera.
• Step 5 is to use the stitch to create something further, a picture, book cover or sleeve for a mobile phone or tablet.

The workshop was relaxed, music was played, and plenty of stitching and chat ensued. Although slow stitch is usually a solitary, relaxing activity, it can be done as a community as demonstrated by today's workshop.

After a relatively long hiatus through lockdown and an exceptionally busy 2023 we thought this year was going to be a little quieter, but by March all that had changed, we suddenly have new exhibiting opportunities both this year and over the coming years at venues new and old and so have dived right into preparing for those.

January - Spring Flowers
We are continuing our series of bi-montly exhibitions at the Oriental Museum in Durham. In January, Alison Lowery tried to get our spirits up by running a fused glass workshop creating spring flowers. We all needed a huge boost after the very long winter, but I have to say my own spring flowers in the garden were much later than usual and were constantly battered by the wind and rain, so a huge thank you goes to Alison for the little pick me up.

March - North African Influences
In March, Maggie ran a collage workshop influenced by North African design. This was run in conjunction with the Oriental Museums, Voices: Contemporary Art & Craft from the Middle East & North Africa. This was such a creative workshop enabling everyone to explore the amazing richness of pattern and colour seen in the arts and crafts of North Africa and the Middle East.
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We are now planning for our future exhibitions. Last year we had 3 major exhibitions. We started at Richmond Station with a second showing of the Elements exhibition previously shown at Locomotion in Shildon.We then spent time working with the collections at Jarrow Hall. These comprised of both a collection of social history material and the objects in the museum at Bede's World, celebrating the life of St Bede. This enabled us to produce an amazing amount of work from different aspects of these collections. We also had the privilege of displaying a number of ceramic works by our late member Carolyn Corfield. Finally we held our winter exhibition at the Witham in Barnard Castle.

We are now in the final stages of preparing for our forthcoming exhibition at the new Changes Gallery in Darlington. We have no theme for this exhibition so again this will be a whole range of styles, subjects and techniques.

We also recently had a planning session at the Oriental Museum in Durham for our forthcoming "Peacocks and Goddesses" exhibition. This will showcase our responses to the theme using exhibits from the museum as our inspiration alongside a retrospective exhibition of the work of Carolyn Corfield. This will run from September 2024 to March 2025 (exact dates to be confirmed).

We also have started thinking about the Traces exhibition at Washington Arts Centre in April 2025. This will be open to interpretation from a whole range of subjects as we Interface members all have different thoughts about this title.  It seems a very long way off but time is flying, it is the end of April already!

After many months of lockdown we have finally resumed our bi-montly workshops at the Oriental Museum in Durham. The first was entitled 'Junk Journals', and yes that means making journals out of junk: junk mail, ribbon, catalogues, scrap paper, lace, photographs, doilies, just about anything you can get your hands on. Although numbers were restricted we had fun, chatting and just being creative. What the journals will be used for is anyone's guess, but the participants now have a good idea what to do with all of that junk that comes through the door.