Latest news with #SewingBee
BBC News
30-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
Sewing Bee judge to become Queen Margaret University chancellor
Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant is to become the next chancellor of Edinburgh's Queen Margaret designer will be installed in his new role at the first of the university's graduations at the Usher Hall on 7 chancellor is the ceremonial head of the university, presiding over graduation ceremonies and performing an ambassadorial up in Edinburgh, Grant has developed an international reputation as a champion of UK textile manufacturing, supporting local communities while producing high-quality, long-lasting garments. Having been educated in both Edinburgh and Barnard Castle, he went on to study a degree in materials science and engineering at the University of Leeds, followed later by an MBA from the University of Woodburn, chairwoman of the Court of Queen Margaret University, said: "Patrick's career and achievements resonate strongly with the university's strong social justice ethos, and with our commitment to building strong communities and acting as a force for good."Past chancellors at the university have included celebrity chef Prue Leith and Sir Tom Farmer, who died earlier this month.
Business Mayor
25-05-2025
- General
- Business Mayor
Cutting crime with community sentences
Re your article (Judges told to favour community alternatives over short prison sentences, 20 May), those given short custodial sentences risk losing their job and home, and there can be a negative impact on family relationships. Being released from prison homeless, unemployed and estranged from family increases the chances of reoffending. Community-based sentences should reduce this and have a positive impact on recidivism. Judith Feline Former governor, HMP Maidstone, Kent I couldn't agree more with Patrick Grant ('Buy less!': why Sewing Bee's Patrick Grant wants us to stop shopping, 19 May). In 2018, I started an experiment to not buy any clothes for a year – it lasted three years, well into the pandemic. I had begun the new year with throwing out 19 pairs of shoes, all with some disrepair. I now buy very few new things. Buying quality is the key, rather than fashionable items. Oxfam will give you a £5 Marks & Spencer voucher if you donate at least one item of M&S clothing. Angela Vnoucek Shrewsbury, Shropshire Instead of demolishing the £25m Brexit food control post in Portsmouth (Report, 31 May), perhaps it could be used to store all the red tape created for UK businesses as a result of Boris Johnson's Brexit deal. A museum dedicated to Brexit. Paresh Motla Thame, Oxfordshire Melanie van Niekirk's letter (23 May) brought a smile to my face and reminded me of the time when discussing saucepans, my wife asked our friend how he finds his induction hob? 'In the kitchen on the left as soon as you enter,' was his prompt repost. Dr Guru Singh Loughborough, Leicestershire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section. READ SOURCE
The Courier
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Celebrities flock to beach-inspired Arbroath garden at Chelsea Flower Show
Arbroath's Hospitalfield Arts has welcomed a string of celebrities to its 'garden in the dunes' on a medal-winning debut at the world-famous Chelsea Flower Show. Presenter Zoe Ball, Dame Floella Benjamin and Scottish businessman and Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant visited the Hospitalfield garden as the show opened. They joined in a colourful protest to support the arts in schools. It features the work of leading contemporary artist Bob and Roberta Smith. The Angus garden was designed by RHS Gold-medal winner Nigel Dunnett. He also designed the walled garden at Hospitalfield. At the garden's centre is an arts 'bothy' studio, which Bob and Roberta Smith has taken over for the Chelsea week. The garden and its evocative planting were inspired by the dunes on the Angus coast. Designer Nigel said: 'Chelsea is a place for new ideas, for experimentation, and to take risks. 'That is certainly the spirit in which we have developed our garden. 'Working with Hospitalfield Arts, and their exciting and important work with contemporary art and young people, has inspired me to take a very abstract and highly sculptural approach to creating a representation of the landscape of the Angus coast. 'Creating that dramatic dunescape has been a real challenge. We've designed striking structures that hold the sand in 'wind-blown' shapes.' The garden impressed RHS judges, who awarded it a silver-gilt medal. Hospitalfield director Lucy Byatt said: 'For nearly 200 years, Hospitalfield has been an artist's house, supporting artists in their working lives and at all stages of their careers. 'The incredible garden that Nigel has designed for RHS Chelsea offers us the platform to highlight the urgent need to nurture creativity…especially for young people.' And after being enjoyed by around 160,000 London visitors, the garden will come back to Arbroath. It will return to Ladyloan Primary School to be used as an outdoor creative space. The Hospitalfield garden is sponsored by Project Giving Back.
New Statesman
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Ah, baking, the only hobby I've really stuck to
Illustration by Charlotte Trounce There's a running joke among my friends that if there was a crafting version of an EGOT – The Great British Bake Off, The Great British Sewing Bee, The Great Pottery Throw Down – I would be first to raise the bunting-adorned trophy. This is categorically nonsense. I could probably have a good run at the Sewing Bee, but the speed it demands would soon undo me. And my adventures in pottery throwing were fairly short lived once I discovered that a) it is a prohibitively expensive hobby, and b) I was considerably less naturally gifted than I'd hoped – or perhaps expected. The Bake Off, however… As a teenager I often forced my mother to spend her Saturday mornings driving me to my favourite specialist baking shop on the A3, and repaid her efforts by covering her kitchen in icing sugar and failing to adequately clean up. But really she asked for it, because she set me off on this sticky path. It was my mother who let me, as an unsteady toddler, transfer eggs from their cardboard nests to the plastic tray in the fridge; who taught me to use a skewer to test if a cake is cooked; how dough should spring back once proved; that 'stiff-peak egg whites' means you should be able to hold the bowl over your head without them falling on it (a high-stakes test). She gave me confidence, and I took it, tended to it, fed it, and it rose into something more. From the flapjacks in my Hamlyn's children's cookbook I graduated to friands and eclairs, croissants and plaited loaves. I learned to mould flowers and leaves from fondant icing; to pipe delicate butterflies out of royal; to shape round buns, sealed beneath, from unwieldily wet doughs. I made increasingly and unnecessarily elaborate cakes for my friends' birthdays, even my own birthdays, and eventually graduated to making wedding cakes: stacking tier upon tier, reinforced with plastic dowels and cakeboards, decorated with spun sugar, edible flowers, candied nuts, oven-dried thins of peach and pear. By the early days of lockdown I baked near daily – to pass the time, to self-soothe. In those first, solitary weeks, I heated sugar to just the right shade of copper for salted-caramel brownies, strained fruit for curds with which to sandwich macarons, brushed honey over delicately thin sheets of filo for baklava. I relished running out of a key ingredient: I guess I have to go to the supermarket now, that most precious of outings. Each week I'd parcel up packages of baked goods to drop on the doorsteps of friends who lived nearby – less out of genuine generosity, more out of the true impossibility of eating it all myself. In my early twenties, in those wilderness months after university and before getting my first staff job at a newspaper, I had filled the days and hours between freelance shifts and unpaid internships running a baking blog, which gave me not just something to do, but a place to write. But slowly, as work became more demanding, as I found creative outlets in other crafts, as I encountered terrible oven after terrible oven in my long series of rental flats, I stopped baking. I retired the blog, and my considerable stash of tins and turntables and palette knives was consigned to boxes in my grandmother's garage. I was, on occasion, persuaded to make a birthday cake, but the desire to bake anything more challenging rarely took me. Until Good Friday, when, after a night of little sleep, I rose at 4.30am with certainty: today was a day for hot cross buns. I worked until a more sociable hour arrived, and then walked to Sainsbury's to gather what I needed: caster sugar, mixed peel, eggs and fresh oranges, to add to the strong white bread flour, yeast, butter, milk and sultanas I had at home. I was craving once again the rhythm of proving and knocking back; the steps laid out simply before me, demanding little more than time and attention. Into the oven went flour and yeast and hope, and out came hot cross buns, golden and glorious – and a little of my old self, too. [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
