Saturday 24th May saw me leading the above workshop, when I was composing my lesson plan, I had on there teacher demonstrates and students watch demonstration, and then work on making the fascinator, then I realised the participants will be making the fascinator along with me. Now that I am teaching online a whole new concept of guiding participants through the stages of making a project is quite different from in person teaching.

As I was demonstrating, these lovely ladies followed the stages of making their own Blackheath Ladies Fascinator. I was asked by Rebecca Cole-Coker who is the current chair of Blackheath Embroiderer’s, we used to be Blackheath Embroiderer’s Guild, but the Guild decided to cut loose the branches and slim down to hold the collection centrally and many branches have either closed or gone online during Covid to fight in keeping going.

A lot of reflection has gone into making this fascinator for the group, I realised I needed to make it as simple as possible, it turned out great, but there were a lot of stages in thinking, designing and creating it. I generated a PowerPoint, I had 15 slides in the presentation thinking that was enough and when I asked for feedback, (which was very constructive) I realised I needed to create more slides and photograph each stage of the process, I did work on the PowerPoint and I have now added a further 10 slides so it comes to 25 slides in total. I used black tulle as the main point of the head piece as black stands for Blackheath and I knew that would stand out great, I worked with a new piece of material which was tulle and it turned out to be quite fiddly and the feedback given was this workshop would not be the best for a beginner to start off with, especially if you haven’t worked with fabrics before, it could be quite frustrating and likely for the student to give up at the first hurdle. As this group has been meeting over years, we have tutors within the group sharing their expertise with us and another tutor had taught a workshop on how to make a bead mandela which was used as the central piece for their fascinator, not everyone used theirs and so the majority used the bead that was given.

This has been a great learning curve for me in creating and delivering workshops and I know this will be an adventure for me working with people online encouraging them in making projects they can complete and have a great sense of achievement knowing they have made it themselves.