Two exhibitions in Wheatley well worth seeing this weekend!

First of all textile pictures by Anne Stewart (event 282). From more than 3 feet away you wouldn't know they were stitched. It's not a technique involving lots of different stitches, mostly machine straight stitches. But her use of colour is subtle and beautiful. She paints first on the cloth then stitches on top. Also patchwork and knitted scarves, again with a sumptuous use of colour. Her garden is rather lovely too!

I'm not religious but Siobhan Fraser's icons (event 281) are absolutely gorgeous. She's reproduced icon styles from different areas, using egg tempera and lots and lots of gold. There's a whole series of St Georges, with different dragons to slay, and some angels with hair like braided rope. Bling and beautiful. She has a website: siobhanfraser.com so you can get an idea of them, but they're definitely worth seeing in the flesh, where you can also ask her about the techniques.

Alan Franklin uses only graphite and paper to create hypnotic abstract 'flat sculpture' drawings within his own unique set of rules. For this piece he gave himself 35 minutes, one continuous line and 1.5cm width all the way round. The detail is reminiscent of when you scribbled in that hole in your school protractor, and the result is like a beautiful tangled mess of a slinky.