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Fashion and Textile Museum
On Wednesday 29th June I had the opportunity to go to the Fashion and Textile museum for a meeting and one of the perks was to be able to visit the RSN exhibition. I visited this exhibition at the beginning of June when we celebrated the Queens Jubilee, this time I had the opportunity to attend the talk and hearing a little bit more of each piece and the development of the RSN, it’s the 150 years anniversary of the school. One of my objectives for the day was to buy either the crewel work or silk shading book authored by the Royal School of Needlework and I settled upon…
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Mindful Stitching
A couple of Mondays ago I went to Kew Gardens for my birthday, it was the first time on my own as I normally meet up with various peeps during the day, although I did have birthday celebrations in the pub later on. I was a bit emotional during the morning and so I never registered that it was going to be a heavily rainy day, to the point I had to draw and later stitch in the orangey, it was very noisy with lots of families taking shelter. As I was so engrossed in copying from a colouring book in developing designs I never saw the sea of faces…
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Design Development
Last Monday I went to Kew Gardens for my birthday, it was the first time on my own as I normally meet up with various peeps during the day, although I did have birthday celebrations in the pub later on. I was a bit emotional during the morning and so I never registered that it was going to be a heavily rainy day, to the point I had to draw in the orangey, it was very noisy with lots of families taking shelter. As I was so engrossed in copying from a colouring book in developing designs I never saw the sea of faces asking me for chairs, I did…
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Preloved Jubilee Needlecase Design
How will you use yours? Both these photos are of the front of the needlecase, I will show you how to sew the needlecase and bag it out, but before we get to that place you need to decide if you want all your seeding stitches in your circles to be red, white or blue, or maybe you want to do a combination of red and white for the circles. This is what I love about teaching, making my samples and giving the options to adapting the pattern to how you dear reader want it to be. As you know I have been doing physio to get strength back into…
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Cable Stitch
In March 2022 at the Blackheath Embroidery group we were all given a stitch to work on and explore the stitch with different threads or thickness of threads within the embroidery skeins. My first sample of cable stitch got me into a tizz as within two different embroidery books that I have on my shelf at home, cable stitch samples were completely different. Mary Thomas shows cable stitch where by you start off with the thread around the needle as you were about to do a French knot and then do a chain stitch, but in the embroidery book of 100 stitches cable stitch by Anchor is called cable chain…
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Preloved Jubilee Needlecase
Why I created Preloved Jubliee Needlecase. As we know it’s the Queens Platinum Jubliee this year 2022 and aren’t we happy that she has been on the throne for the past 70 years, I wonder what it’s like for her to have seen so much change in the span of a lifetime. I knew a few months ago that I wanted to make a handmade embroidery needlecase, but I had been waiting for my wrist to improve so I could do a major piece of stitching without it hurting, I have been doing physio each day, thankfully I have improved enough in my range of movement to drop down to…
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Cable Stitch
I have been given cable stitch as a fun activity to learn and sample for Blackheath Embroiderer’s group. The strange thing is that cable stitch in Mary Thomas book of embroidery stitches is also known as cable chain stitch, other publications show cable stitch as cable chain stitch and cable stitch in other publications show it as a side to side stitch. Looking through crochet and knitting images of cable stitch,(yes they are different) show a similar stitch to embroidery, (they all have curves within the cable stitches), so I did find it a little odd when coming across this discrepancy and why I think it is odd. Mary Thomas book…
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Lizzie
I really enjoyed working with Lizzie, she said “the workshop was great for mindfulness and bringing her into a state of calmness”. I gave Lizzie a private workshop experience before the actual workshop of Samines Red as she was stuck in doors with Covid, she choose to rest and heal herself before being fit enough to come back into the world again. During the workshop Lizzie decided to sew all her petals together to make one large corsage flower and I think it has worked out well. It was great to see her on zoom, I love zoom as it has opened up the world for people to connect who…
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Samines Red
When creating this piece I was teaching another workshop online and while waiting as my client was working in her flower crown, I used the time to make another flower. In earlier times before starting to make the satin flowers I used to make corsages on the sewing machine and using ribbons embedded with machine embroidery on rectangular fabric pieces that would be wrapped around around the wrist.
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Anyone for Aqua?
I swooped my swim for aqua aerobics on Wednesday 9th Feb, as I have been cat sitting for a friend in Peckham and as I was on holiday it felt right to do something different, so I went along to Peckham Pulse. Lorraine the instructor was brilliant and worked us hard and I was thankful that I have been swimming twice a week for physio reasons for my ankles, knees and wrist. On Tuesday 8th I had tried a salsa video session and it flared up fatigue in both ankles and knees, with the aqua I experienced sharp pains in my knees, (I have been experiencing this since the accident)…
Revealed Beauty