The call out went out to the creative team at ACL Islington for Black History month for October 2025 and I went along with a couple of my learners, Bobette and Lesley. They asked me what to expect and I honestly said to them I do not know as the email was sent out and I didn’t know what to expect, should I take more embroideries from my learners or was it wise to take all of the embroideries from all the other learners to show case embroidery for the event. We rocked up and I found that the event was a minimal affair with myself, Coraleen and Petra show casing our classes and the work produced.
Lisa who I met at the event may attend the course starting in January 2026 and who took the video, but that will depend if she enrols and if there are other learners who are in front of her on the wait list. Can you believe it! I have a wait list for embroidery, I am so very thankful for the learners who come, who show commitment and keep showing up and always ask me when the new course is live on the website so they can sign up.
I am showing the video that Lisa took for me and is a collection of videos I have of the event that I need to write an article to show case the sewing team’s work and achievement in what we do in supporting the residents who become learners from Islington borough.
It took me ten minutes to unpick the section shown in the photo, the reason being is I had run out of purple embroidery floss and I did not have enough purple to see me to the end of the section, it would have looked incorrect with another block of colour when the whole piece has whole blocks of colour for the different sections. The section of the wall hanging that you are seeing is part of a diptych wall hanging, the work is still in progress as I am teaching from it and now that we are in half term my learners have learnt all the stitches for this course and venturing into independent work.
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I have been inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry coming to the Uk in 2026 and thought if the tapestry makes the journey from France to the UK it would be a great opportunity to learn a bit more about this amazing 92 meters of tapestry, which is not a tapestry but in fact an embroidery which was created in wool.
I have taught my learners how to embroiderer laid stitch, chain stitch, stem and outline stitch to encompass the laid stitch, as we are on half term I have not seen the start of their embroidery’s, so I am looking forward to seeing what they have started when I get back to the class next week.
“I had the absolute honour and pleasure of working with Saminamary and her incredible learners Charlie and Gulsah, the unbelievable talent that they posses is breath taking and helped greatly with this project to become extraordinary. From independent working to illustrating the dragons themselves with amazing skill and with hardly any embroidery thread, they did an incredible amazing job!
Saminamary was an absolute pleasure in coming in and teaching the beautiful interns about various techniques as well as working on the spinal cord details and as well as embroidering the eye of a dragon for a beautiful dress we were doing. And I can not be more thankful for the skill level and their attention to detail they showed sheer talent.
I am very, very grateful and thankful to all these incredible embroiderers and artisans who have been involved in making the Girl who ate the Dragon just an amazing collection. Obviously Saminamary classes are teaching people incredible skills, making sure people who are doing work experience know what they are doing with very little interaction or need for help, that they are strong independent workers and that is something wonderful for a designer as I do not have to guide people every second: I felt they were kind, sweet and incredible at their jobs”.
In 2024 saw big birthdays for three members of my family, myself included. I never made myself anything, but for the other two members, I wanted to make something special for each of them. It is in the last few years that I have come back to my hand embroidery, once I got the diploma in hand embroidery at the Centre of Excellence, it opened the door for me to successfully secure my teaching position at Islington Council within the ACL department. I have been in the position as the embroidery tutor for over 18 months and I am flying high and having the best time!
My sister got a hand embroidery piece with green fly, straight and feather stitches and then ribbon and organza overlay, flowers secured on with buttons on top of the green foliage for her big birthday, but what about my nephew? I knew I did not want to do another hand embroidery piece as they are time consuming and yet at the same time so calming to do to take my mind off things. I had a deadline of going away to America and I knew for my nephew I wanted to do something different, so I looked on his website and Instagram and I was reminded of The Breathe Key. It is a guided series of mediation and deep breathing techniques to centre the body into a calm state, once I looked at the colours of turquoise, I knew that was it, I had my inspiration.
I did not plan anything in the sketchbook as I worked directly onto the fabric. I did not have any turquoise fabric; all the satin had been used to make the fabric flowers that were selling at Greenwich Market before the pandemic. I did however have calico and water colour, so I did a water colour wash in turquoise and painted that over the fabric, this was coming out quite big to about A3 or just under it. What do I put on top of the watercolour? I went through my box of old pieces of calico of hand embroidery or painted fabric and I found it, a calico piece painted with bronze, blue and it is either silver or grey acrylic paint. I cut the piece up into stripes and played around with the placement of the shapes onto the fabric, pinned it down and then decided I wanted to do complete this piece with machine embroidery. I used the Bernia 1000, which I love, but the machine was not loving the rayon threads that my sister bought for me one birthday many moons ago, but the rayon is nice and has a nice shine so I preserved. I am glad I preserved as the piece evolved into a semi-circle and then I realised I needed something to fill in the bottom space. As I was in deep flow I also realised I needed something other than machine embroidery so I looked through my button box and found some beads and a button in a clear plastic bag that was intended to be made into a piece of jewellery, although the initial links had been put on they had not been linked up to make the said item. I took a few of the beaded wire over to the piece that had been machine embroidered and positioned them on; I was happy with the result and I felt satisfied; I took a picture and then proceeded to hand sew the beaded wire to the piece. I was so happy with the results! It was only until I had given the piece to my nephew that I remembered I had not taken any closeup pictures of the piece after it had been laced, thankfully my nephew sent me over 45 shots.
Saul’s birthday was in August and as I am still in recovery from cfs/long covid it was not until March 2025 that I was well enough and during the school holiday’s that I had the extra capacity to travel to see him to hand the piece in person. I did not want to send the picture in the post.
I have spent two hours on a number of content projects to upload and link from Sewing with Samines YouTube channel to Eventbrite; to find the event has already closed and it will not allow me to open it back up, to cropping a video to try and upload here on the website.
It has been in the last few weeks that a new idea emerged about uploading the demonstration embroidery videos to YouTube. Initially I was thinking of uploading to a private channel, but that would be more work for me with my embroidery learners and I am a sessional tutor, uploading videos to YouTube would take me away from embroidering, which I love. Also, it doesn’t sit well with my current energies of recovering from long covid, I call it the long c as I do not want that to be my identity during this time of recovery. Just this morning I worked on closing the course report to send to a senior manager and I did a few other bits, this was between 9-9.50am, I was going to pack the laptop away so I could go to the library and discovered I needed to rest, which I did and I ended up sleeping for an hour on the sofa between 10-11am. Once I woke up I realised I had energy and I have been working across these different platforms, I can feel brain pressure or headaches, so I better be quick as I am stretching into 2 & ½ hours, (I have had a few breaks, but not the same as my morning break).
I have titled this project as Quilting and Embroidery Bag which has been designed for ACL Islington.
The fabric is calico and the original design came from clip art and then I modified it to put channels in. Channels as you can see from the picture are two parrel lines in either straight or curved lines to form the design. Maleeka a past learner of mine wanted to do embroidery birds and you know when an idea or thought is shared it can sit with you and only be released in two ways, one you forget about it or two you act upon the idea and create it into reality. I looked through a lot of clip art bird images and could not really find one that I liked and so I am glad I was able to modify this owl to fit in with the Italian quilting technique.
Once the channels are sewn in and it took a long time as I first started off with back stitch and took me a whole hour for one side. The stitches were bubbling up, which means they were looping up as the thread in the needle is double and not single, and then I thought I would try how the running stitches would look instead, much much better! So, I am pleased with the end results, I left the back and running stitch in the same piece so I could show my learners my thought and design process, they were glad that I did.
