Briefly back to lace. Nottingham Society of Artists exhibition featuring textiles and lace.

 I'm just adding this post as the exhibition motioned opened yesterday 27.5.25 and runs until the 31.5.25.

The current exhibition is called Found and I attended the launch party last night, rather last minute as I had been intending to go on Thursday. I may still go back then and take a closer look.

The three artists are very different, Christina Williams produced cards, hand made books and exhibited a collection of spoons made from found objects

.

I apologise for the reflections, glass is always a little difficult.

Like many people, I was studying these hard, trying to identify what had been repurposed

Jackie Ward makes amazing figures of people being people, absolutely loved them.

However , I must admit that the main reason for going was to see the Suzanne's lace.

and on to Chirk

 

Chirk dates back to 1324 but little of that remains. The village grew in the 17 centaury and by 1826 the main road London to Holyhead had been built and the Hand hotel became the post office for mail Oswestry to Llangollen. The railway soon followed but this remained as the main route into Wales until the A5 was built.

 

Nowadays it is a small town, set alongside the canal and the railway, with a sweet centre at its heart as its home to Cadburys factory and the smell of chocolate occasionally wafts by

There are a few shops on the high street, an excellent cafe set in a wool and teddy bear shop along with a quilting shop, butchers and the other essentials.

An easy walk out of town brings you down to the canal where I stopped by the coffee boat for a drink and had a long and interesting conversation with a gentleman carrying a barn owl on his bike.

The local church was open and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of information boards about the towns development.

Also the needlepoint/tapestry hassocks

The roof bosses were repainted in the 1970's and add a splash of colour amongst the wooden beams.

Almost forgot the beautiful castle gates just past the campsite entrance.

and the railings in the town

along with this wooden bench.

I suspect that we will return to this campsite as a stop over on the way into Wales.

the black and white buildings keep coming but this time we have an alternative form of transport as well.

We are at Bridgnorth, complete with cliff railway connecting the two parts of the town. A flying visit which will be repeated when Ian is able to accompany me.

The amazing buildings are still with us, this is Bishop Percys house built in 1580 and currently a tea shop / cafe

and this is the town hall built in 1652

Other interesting buildings were scattered around the town,

The original plan had been to visit the Severn Valley Railway but there weren't any trains running due to a landslide so I settled for tea and cake in the 1940s cafe and planned a return visit, probably the same time next year.

For those who are wandering why I seem to be travelling solo, Ian has pulled his back and confining himself to the van and campsite at most of our destinations. We will be repeating this tour so he can catch up with everything that he missed.

Museum, Textiles , more black and white houses

 First of all, I must apologise for the poor quality of the photos. The lighting was bad and most items were behind glass.

Our next town was Leominster, about 12 mile from Ludlow. Many beautiful houses as you will see later in this post but I also spent quite some time in the local museum chatting with Carol, one of the volunteers. 

The current VE80 exhibitions caught my eye, including this sampler depicting woman's roles during the war years, There's a land girl, munitions works, wife/mother, ATS (Women's Branch British Army ) nurse and WRAF (Women's Royal Airforce )

Reusing old clothing to make rag rugs was encouraged. Interestingly, on our next campsite, the lady in the caravan next door was making a clippy rug with woollen fabrics, further conversation revealed that she was also a spinner.

 Make do and mend, darning mushroom.

There was , however, a sweet spinning wheel, unfortunately someone didn't have instructions on how to put it together.

The spinning wheel is an easy fix and once the flyer has been repositioned it should spin nicely.

They also had a display of miniature hats made by a local milliner. Unfortunately I forgot to noted down the details regarding dates etc and the photos do not do them justice at all.

Fir lunch, I was recommended to visit Grange Court built in 1633 and later relocated to the site of the castle, where there is an embroidery exhibition of the history of Leominster, Beautiful building, excellent food at a reasonable price.

Building wise, similar to Ludlow as you may expect, timber frames abound.

and there were sheep !!