Bags for all occasions

It is an understatement to say that Susan Briscoe likes making bags, she is prolific, and last Thursday the Embroiderers' Guild had the pleasure of seeing many of her samples – please click on the photos to enlarge them.

An Arts Foundation course sparked her interest in textiles but her career, initially, took a very different path and she found herself researching "safe routes to school for the children of Liverpool"!

However, after a life-changing decision, her own "safe route" took her to Japan for a year. This was a huge influence on her work and she is now a successful author of many books on bag making, quilting and Sashiko embroidery.

The Japanese tradition of wrapping gifts in fabric had led to some innovative designs in bags for holding wine bottles and one to protect and carry a book whilst travelling, and it is fair to say that if something needs a bag, then Susan has probably made the bag for it.

There was an array of briefcases, rucksacks, shopping bags, laptop bags, miniature sweet-bags, handbags with matching purses, hold-alls with special ticket pockets and a Quilters bag for holding cutting mat ruler and cutter – all of them a riot of patchwork, embroidered and embellished fabric.

Many of us who enjoy project-based books expect the instructions to include helpful step-by-step photography and it was fascinating to hear the stories behind this process that we take for granted.

Susan was writing books before digital photography was good enough for published material and she has survived many a nightmare situation on receiving the proof photos days after the photo session, only to find that she would have to reproduce the samples for a re-shoot when the original fabrics had been cut up and were many stages down the line of the finished article.

She also had to keep a close eye when photographs were "styled" – for example, someone would probably notice that the bag embroidered in Japanese Sashiko was sitting on a Chinese newspaper. And who would have thought that the wine bottle labels would need an "air-brushing" because the director of the publishing company was a tee-totaller!

Our next meeting on 2nd December is the Christmas Lunch, at Brookfield Golf Club, for members only.

Please check out our website for more photos and information – click on the link below the photos.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.