Belated Epiphany

I had a belated epiphany today; Gina and I were driving along the A25, putting the world to rights when I narrowly avoided going into the back of a car whose brake lights I had not seen - very careless, especially with another passenger in my car. We were on our way to the Grace Barrand Centre at Nutfield to see the 'Select' exhibition and have a nice lunch - which we did. The exhibition was small, but beautiful and inspiring and I wandered round wondering where the inspiration came from and how it got to where it was. And what journey was my inspiration on, as it certainly wasn't alongside me.

Over a yummy panini and two pairs of eyes on some delicious looking rocky road brownies, we continued to talk about directions and pathways before heading back to give a joint talk to Sevenoaks' Embroiderers Guild, about life after city and guilds machine embroidery. Sevenoaks are a fabulous guild - friendly and very stitchy and I talked my talk about sewing machines and machine embroidery, pointing out that my needle frequently found it's way into the fabric and refused to come out or a tangle of threads on the underside of the work was perfectly normal, and on some occasions, could be described as a feature. Gina shared her work and stories and afterwards, when the audience came forward to look at the goodies and ask questions, I found myself feeling confident enough to impart advice on 'which sewing machine?/what needle to use?' - to chuckle at the knitted nautiloids that came along for the ride and describe how they and other items were made.

Then I heard one member say to me 'Having seen all this I think I'm confident to have a go and master my own machine', and I had my belated epiphany as it occured to me that inspiration doesn't always mean production of exhibition standard work as we had seen at Select. Sometimes it just means that you give a person enough 'oomph' to go away and have a go themselves.

(And we never ordered the rocky road brownies!)