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CETG Meeting on Monday 11th July 2022

Viki Jenkins - Finding My Way in Stitch

We are fortunate at CETG to have had Viki as a member for many years now. She has been very active in the group and served on the committee for several years as the Programme Secretary finding fascinating speakers for the group.  For our talk this month it was lovely to have Viki as our speaker and to find out about her stitch journey in detail.

Viki gave us a fascinating and revealing talk about her life and stitching.  She has a number of qualifications in Fashion and Textiles from the London College of Fashion and the University of Huddersfield.  However, it was details of her certificate in Technical Hand Embroidery from the Royal School of Needlework that was of most interest.  

There are four sections to this qualification

• Crewelwork

• Canvas or Blackwork (Viki chose Canvas work)

• Basic Silk Shading which is usually botanical

• Basic Goldwork

The brief for each section is incredibly specific and has to be adhered to. It includes the material you can work on, the size, the colours used and most importantly the types of stitches and how much of the piece must incorporate them.  Viki’s favourite

piece was the Silk Shading which was done in single stranded embroidery silk and could involve using up to eight different needles and threads at any one time!  Her least favourite was the Canvas work which involved a lot of unpicking!  

She managed to finish her course in November 2020 during lockdown as small groups could get together for educational purposes at that time.  She handed in her last piece in December 2020 and finally had her graduation ceremony in July 2021.

Sadly, as a result of the pandemic and a stressful job Viki lost all impetus to be creative for a while but in September 2021 she joined an online dying course run by 'In Stitches' based in Wokingham institchestextilecourses.co.uk. This included many different dyeing techniques such as immersion dyeing, printing with various screens,

discharge dyeing and eco printing and Viki had some beautiful examples of the pieces she made.  

However, recently she has been on another on-line course called 'Experimental Still Life' run by Gabriella Buckingham www.gabriellabuckingham.com.  This is a painting class which ran for 6 weeks and has only just finished but gave Viki back her inspiration to be creative again and taught her that she does like drawing!

Using meditation and journalling Viki now feels she has got her life back on track and now knows she is an artist.  Meditation helps her to focus and clear her mind and the journalling helps her to identify the creative things she likes,plus those she doesn’t!  

For the future she plans to continue with painting still life and will move into abstraction.  She also intends to take more classes and to start a blog at the end of July 2022.  You can already follow Viki on Instagram at @thread_meditations.  We would all like to wish Viki every success in the future and look forward to hearing where her journey in creativity will take her next.

Text © Michaela Matza CETG
Photos © Viki Jenkins