Craft Group

Our Craft Group provides a welcome space in busy lives for personal crafting time and the opportunity to learn new craft skills and techniques.  All levels of expertise are catered for from the beginner to the experienced crafter. When there is no specific joint project underway, members are invited to bring their own current pieces and to work on them while enjoying a sociable afternoon or evening. If you would like to come please contact Margaret H who co-ordinates our meetings. New members are always welcome.

2025 Regular craft group members and others spent an excellent afternoon at the Institute on 9th July when our tutor, Meg Richardson, first explained that artists’ books are books or book-like objects which are intended as works of art in themselves. She showed us beautiful examples of her own work and that of others. The variety of sizes, ways of folding the paper and content surprised us all. Meg stressed the importance of relating the structure of the book to the planned contents of the pages and of always respecting the grain of the paper or board. Then she led us through the process of creating our own maze books. Using scalpels, steel rulers and bone folders we carefully cut and creased our sheets of A4 paper. Then we chose papers for our covers and, working fast, glued them to boards already cut by Meg, first cutting and then folding the corners of the cover paper with a ‘printer’s pinch’. Once the boards were covered, we stuck the end pages of the maze paper to them. Finally we chose ribbon for fastening the book, used a bradawl or a chisel to make a hole in the board, passed the ribbon through it and hit it with a hammer to secure it. The books need to be pressed under heavy weights to dry for a day or two to prevent the edges curling. Meg ended with showing us different types of book that are easy to make and some of the different methods of stitching that can be used for holding books together.

A few members of our group, together with a few committee members, came together on Thursday 3 April to cut out our market bags for sale at the Adderbury St. Mary’s Church Christmas Market in November, on our stall.  The market is a really lovely event and members are always most enthusiastic and helpful with their homemade contributions of cakes, preserves, biscuits and meringues and we thought our market bags would be very much appreciated by our customers.  Thanks to our generous and lately much lamented member Meriel, who passed away at Christmastide, we had a great collection of material presented to us to measure up and cut out and thanks to the efforts of Maureen G, Kay and Theresa, we now have 22 bags all ready to be stitched in preparation for Christmas 2025.

2024 Our Craft Group meeting on Monday 11 November was excellent, for many A, not least of all that two members kindly brought delicious cakes to the table, plus a raft of well-made decorations for the Victorian Christmas tree.  We met again on Monday 25 November to continue and finalise our Christmas crafting items for St. Mary’s Christmas Tree Festival for the weekend of 6 – 8 December.The tree was decorated in time for the opening of the Festival and though we were not among the winners this year, it looked wonderful and attracted many positive comments.

Craft Group members gathered together on Monday 28 October at 2pm at Sarah’s for more Christmas craft work.  Our thanks to Sarah for hosting our meeting and to Maureen for another delicious cake.  Good discussions for the items we are planning to produce.

Pat had been asked by Liz our Vicar at St. Mary’s if crafting members could produce six large poppies for the Remembrance Day Service of commemorations and we were all delighted to purchase six of the very large poppies created by the Royal British Legion.

We met again on Monday 30 September, at 2pm, to discuss items we would like to produce. Sarah had once again offered to host this session and this time Maureen kindly provided a cake.

Members met on Monday 9 September 2024, for a lively and stimulating discussion of ideas for our 2024 Christmas Tree for St. Mary’s tree festival.  We are to create a Victorian Christmas tree with baubles, candles, flowers, ribbons and bows and crackers.  Margaret provided a cake for our meeting.

Only a few members were able to join Sarah at  home for a summer crafting session on Monday, 8 July, when own crafts were enjoyed and worked on.

.Members gathered on Monday 10 June 2024 at Sarah’s home for an excellent crafting session, w ith our own crafts and lots of good discussion about future plans and our own crafting activities.  We are next to meet on Monday 8 July and many thanks to Sarah for once again offering to host this event.

Our Craft group met on Monday 13 May, kindly hosted by Rebecca, for discussions over future crafts to try out and very early ideas and suggestions for our Victorian Christmas Tree event.  Members brought their current craft work to share and we carried on earlier ideas for our next project and our Christmas tree for St. Mary’s Christmas Tree Festival this year.   We had a full complement of 12 members and a great exchange of news items and lively chatter.

We met again on Monday 11 March, kindly hosted by Meriel, to finalise our tulip making for our April 4 Members’ Meeting.  Origami folding and creasing is fascinating.

We met next at Meriel’s on Monday 19 February 2024, to have a go at making origami tulips, with material and instructions kindly provided by Meriel, to share with members at our 4 April 2024 meeting at The Institute.

At January 22nd’s Craft Group meeting,  lanterns were made and decorated for our celebration of Chinese New Year with David Yip for our 1 February Members’ Meeting.

 2023
Members have continued working on the conservation of the original Adderbury and Milton WI banner throughout the months that the National Needlework Archive in Newbury is open. With the time taken for travelling these are long days but encouraging progress is being made and we have been told that we will be allowed to borrow the banner when the work is completed. We hope to display it not only to all our WI members but also to the wider public in the village. Many residents remembering it hanging in different venues in Adderbury.

Starting in August, craft group members spent many sociable hours creating the decorations for our entry in the village Christmas Tree Festival. Once it had been decided to use the opportunity to spread the message relating to the current WI Resolution on Clean Rivers for People and Wildlife, members cleverly used waste and found materials to cover the tree, starting at the top where the water was clean and full of wildlife and gradually changing to show increasing pollution and the death of fish, finishing with items of litter scattered over the material covering the base. The theme clearly resonated with visitors to the Festival and we were overjoyed to be the Winner in the Community Category for Best Decorated Tree 2023.

2022 We were at  St. Mary’s Church on Thursday 1 December to dress our Christmas tree for the festival.  We had been given a very central position and we set to work adding lights before placing our ginko angels, dried orange slices, dried vine leaves, acorn and berry bracelets, teasel candles, dogwood wreaths with honesty leaves and Chinese Lanterns and our beautiful angel with dried leaves for her wings, a Chinese Lantern with honesty petals, a brown seed husk and long legs and arms, designed and made by Janet.  We finished our tree with a skirt of hessian and more vine leaves, other leaves, berries and dried citrus slices.  Our framed tree legend stood proudly by. This was the culmination of meetings throughout the autumn when members first decided on the theme and then collected all the materials which inspiration, hard work and enjoyment turned into original and sustainable decorations on the theme of Nature’s Bounty. We were delighted to win the most votes for Overall Winner Best Decorated Tree.

September’s meetings saw early discussion of Christmas crafts, and work on knitted or crocheted poppies and cotton yarn dishcloths. The cloths later went on sale at our stall at the village Christmas Market.

Craft members did not meet in July and August.

In June we discussed ideas for future projects and our fabric tulips, poppies, bunting and Christmas themes.

Origami flowers, cut-out bee shapes and fabric tulips all made by the members of our Craft Group. May 2022. The fabric flowers took much longer to cut-out, prepare and construct than we expected but we completed them in time to decorate The Institute as planned and enjoy the results of our labours.

At our meeting in May we continued work on our fabric tulip flowers. Three members met on Thursday 28 April to put together more components of our fabric tulips, in preparation for our Members’ Meeting in May, when part of our meeting will highlight our crafted origami flowers, cut-out bee shapes and tulip creations to celebrate International Bee Day for 2022 on Friday 20 May.

At an excellent Craft Group meeting on Thursday 21 April a smaller group than usual managed an exciting production line for our origami flowers and bee cut-outs for May’s Members’ Meeting.

Members enjoyed a most productive Craft group meeting on Monday 28 March, for our Spring has Sprung project for April, making pop-up tulip and rose cards to be given out to all members at our Meeting on 7 April.  We have so enjoyed making our cards, with a pattern cleverly sourced by Janet, that we are considering creating our own greetings cards in future, for all members, for  all occasions.

On Monday 14 March after discussing our own latest projects, Janet showed her found ideas for a Spring greetings card to present to the membership at April’s Members’ Meeting.  It was a pop-up flower card which Janet had practised to a point where she was able to demonstrate its design and make-up to us.This led on to a good production line for the card and the two chosen flower designs, with members creating templates, fold-ups and even more intricate flower picture folding.  We were all pleased to be re-purposing paper material such as magazines and plant brochures, using glue, scissors, pens and pencils.

Our group meeting on the afternoon of 14 February gave time for everyone to be busy with their own crafts of knitting scarves and socks, and for crochet enthusiasts to make wash cloths and dish cloths of cotton yarn.  Discussion of ideas for our Easter-Springtime project gave rise to a greatly animated exchange on the merits of recent new crafting ideas, material usage, ease and convenience of making and handling, design and most practically, the availability of time to create beautiful objects to share with the membership.

We met on Monday 24 January to share ideas and techniques for creating models for the new and previously unexplored art of origami, which we had just begun practising at home.  Paper folding needs to be precise to create the exact shape required, it is fun and enjoyable and great satisfaction was gained by attending members.  We had sufficient green hearts for the ‘Show the Love’ campaign from our get-together and a new craft understood, ready to use for any future project.

Our first meeting of the new year was on Monday 17 January at 10.30, kindly hosted by Gill. We explored different ways of creating green hearts for the ‘Show the Love’ campaign. As well as the more usual approach using fabric we attempted origami, the Japanese art of paper folding.

2021 Members of the group met regularly either via Zoom or in person. We enjoyed a variety of projects throughout the year, starting with an introduction to the Japanese craft of Amigurumi. Using crochet techniques new to most of us, we created stuffed dinosaurs in two colours. Next we fashioned flower brooches, making enough to give one to every WI member. Then we turned our minds to Remembrance Sunday and crafted two large wreaths of crocheted or knitted poppies which were displayed in the village. Finally we created the decorations for our entry for the Adderbury Christmas Tree Festival, which celebrated the founding of the first WI in Adderbury in 1921. The decorations were based on items from the banner of the Adderbury and Milton WI which is now held in the National Needlework Archive.

Projects in 2019 included the following:

Every WI in Oxfordshire was asked to embroider a leaf to be part of the Oxfordshire WI 2019 Centenary wall hanging.  Each leaf had to show the full name and date of inauguration of that WI. We chose a sycamore leaf as one was on the banner of the first WI in Adderbury, and one of our members designed and stitched it. (We later found out that the original was actually a maple leaf, celebrating the Canadian origin of the WI movement!)

Members created items for a group entry for the OFWI craft exhibition at Didcot. and in the Autumn we made small poppy badges, one for for each member to wear at the November meeting.

Group members also helped with making the decorations for our entry in the 2019 Christmas Tree Festival.