Mothers' Union Blackburn Diocese

One Thing Leads To Another - Dorothy Martin, Bamber Bridge Branch.

After we had made over 300 scrub bags, around 40 headbands and lots of face masks, for Chorley hospital and 2 local nursing homes, what next?

We are lucky to have a large garden and the weather was lovely, so that kept us busy for a while until, the rain came. Out came the craft boxes, it’s surprising what you keep for rainy day projects. I found some pieces of cross stitch material and then some blank cards. Every year I say that I’m going to make all my Christmas cards and somehow time gets away from me and it doesn’t happen. Now, with plenty of time on my hands, I had no excuse. I have plenty of threads in the house and spent a lovely afternoon searching books for patterns.

This is when one thing leads to another… When our grandchildren were born I made them all Christmas stockings with their names stitched on – they are in their early 20’s now and when we have our family meal on Boxing Day the stockings come out. Now the boys bring their girlfriends, and so that they don’t feel left out, this year I’ve made a few more.

We have plenty of lavender in the garden, so using up the small pieces of material I found, lavender bags have been made to pop into the girls stockings. Once it’s dry I will fill the bags and tie them off with ribbon (another find!)

This year, filling the stocking won’t be quite as easy as usual. We aren’t shopping as much so aren’t spending as much time looking around for gift ideas. Looking to do something different I searched on the internet for alternative suggestions. Silly stockings was the answer, I found silly/cryptic tags and printed them ready to attach to each gift. This is a fun and inexpensive way to continue our tradition – and hopefully will give everyone a giggle to. Some of the items everyone will have in their cupboards and others are easily picked up with your weekly shop. Here are a few I have already made...

From Pam Coates, St Mary the Virgin MU,Eccleston, Nr Chorley

During ‘lockdown’ I accepted an arts and crafts challenge, which a friend had found on line, from The Arts Quarter in Cheddar, the other end of the country but,  hey ho, I thought it will be something to keep me occupied!

This began in April with a challenge or topic each day and we could represent it in any form - drawing, photograph, painting, fabric art, whatever. 

The ‘make’ was posted each day and appeared on the Facebook page. It was lovely to see how others interpreted the challenge and to see what fantastic artist there are out there. Well, one month went into 2 months then 3 months, so you can now see that I have about 95 products of 3 months in ‘lockdown’. 

These range from paintings to fabric postcards, drawings to cross stitch, photographs to paper art patchwork to fabric collage. I have a photograph of each in an album and have kept all my makes in a big bag. The challenge has ended although we can work on 2 or 3 items to enter into a display in Cheddar…a bit far away I thought!

So, what to do with these ‘things’, I am thinking that I may get a little talk together so watch this space.
A few examples - there are 90 more!