I help your hands create something beautiful
It’s been a while since I have the Samines shop activated on Etsy. I decided to move over to Folksy as this is the UK equivalent to Etsy that is based in America. I have been slack and have let many things go and I know I will have to sort the Samines shop out on Folksy, I just have not kept up with my online presence and as a result I have not grown. So this is my renewed listing of one of the table runners, maybe I need to name those, especially when I post on social media to link everything.
I am not sure I had the chance to blog about this piece as the time frame for September 2022. I thought I would blog about it now as I am improving my energy levels with long covid and I have a back log of blogs and thoughts to share with you.
This is the screen shot from embrioderyboydave a fellow embroidery artist that I met at Blackheath Embroiderer’s. I had a break from being part of the group for about 5-8 years while I was working part time at Phrase Eight and selling at Greenwich Market.
A visitor had come to the group asking for volunteers to submit work for the Museum of Sexual Objects and Dave’s and my piece were shown at The Horse Hospital.
I created this piece from the news article about a 15-year-old school girl who was stripped searched by the police while she was on her period, it was an outrage and I was emotionally consumed with researching images to create this piece. It is all done in straight stitch.
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 the silk shading book. When I got home I quickly messaged Emma who I have met through the Art of Embroidery group on Facebook, (she has kindly agreed to mentor me in embroidery). Emma then messaged back informing me that one of her pieces is in the exhibition, (as she studied at the Royal School of Needlework) I think I may have to take myself back to the exhibition to look for it.
At the end of the tour we had the opportunity to go into a room that had more embroidery in as well as a continual video about stitch and one of the pieces on display was of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. The RSN had embroidered her in blackwork which is a technique in embroidery, that was first thought to be bought to England around the time of King Henry Vlll by Catherine of Aragon and I can understand why the RSN would stitch the Duchess of Cornwall in blackwork, as when Prince Charles comes to the throne, the Duchess will be then known as Queen Consort.
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 my wrist, as I improve in strength and mobility I am seeing the results of my hard work and that I can stitch for longer without it hurting. It still hurts if I have overdone it with other tasks and jobs that need doing, each day I see a little more progress and this gives me the encouragement to keep on going.
So I encourage you to keep going with your stitching, because if at first you don’t succeed that is when you need to say okay I can do this, I will give myself a break and then get back to it either that day or the next and with every yes of pushing through you will get to your end goal as well.
This needle-case has been recycled from a pair of mens jeans, this time cutting up the legs as they gave me the right size to work with. Stitches used are seeding and spilt 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 stitch.
I decided to go with Mary Thomas book as the correct source as it was published within the 1930s and the 100 embroidery stitches by anchor was published sometime in the 50s or 60s, so you can see my dilemma. It didn’t help matters either with the internet searches as the RSN (royal school of needlework) has called cable stitch, cable chain stitch.
My sample shows the cable stitch on the right from Mary Thomas and the left side of the photo has a stitch that would have been called side stem stitch.
