Samines

I help your hands create something beautiful

Category: Hand Embroidery

  • 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 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.

  • Mindful Stitching

    Design and Stitch go hand in hand

    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 asking me for chairs, I did have to say no to one woman who wanted the other table as I was busily working and needed the space, thankfully she moved on.

    I was in the process of stitching this piece, but have had to lay it down while other tasks have emerged. I had started stitching this piece after finishing some design development on my birthday in the Orangery, (do you remember the rainy day?).

    As the day drew late into the early afternoon, I realised I had to be at my next place where I was gonna meet up with friends. I arranged for people to start coming at 6pm, but I got there at 4.15pm and realised I had loads of time, so I sat with a fruit cider and carried on stitching while waiting. 

    Although the day didn’t start as well as it could have, the evening did finish well and with a positive ending, as I was surrounded by friends who came to celebrate with me.

  • 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 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.

  • Cable Stitch

    Sampling

    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.

  • 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 5 a day, when I first started physio exercises from the consultant I was doing them 8 per day and then I carried them on when I started having hand therapy.

    I looked on Instagram and Pinterest for many posts to see the sweet pieces being made with flowers and blanket stitches around the circles and the use of blanket stitch for the edges and I was conscious that if I followed suit the piece could look similar and I like to be different in my creations, this gives me the push to create new pieces. This got me thinking and I thought what could I design that was for the current day, the Queen, she’s current and it’s her platinum Jubliee this year and she came to the throne in 1952 which was around the time of The Festival of Britain and I knew that was it! I had my inspiration. Phew….

    I then remembered my sketchbook from my BTEC Fashion that I worked on using Lucian and Robin Day’s designs to create my own which was part of a 50s project to develop design work in one of my classes. So I looked on the above social media accounts, well actually Pinterest and looked up their designs and I came across one with a lop sided circle with straight lines coming out, then their were circles on the end of the straight lines, but when I came to start the design, (I didn’t translate to paper, just straight onto the fabric). I realised after cutting out a circle in jeans material and placing it onto the cut pieces of the jeans legs, along with the stitches, that I had used the middle of the circle as the centre of the design and not towards the outer circle, it’s still a good design and I believe it works well for the front of the needle case. I used split stitch for the straight lines and seeding stitch to create the circles at the end of the outer lines, my colour-ways are red, white and blue as these are the colours that were given at the Blackheath embroidery group for our stitched postcard, (which I haven’t started stitching, but I have the design work done, so at least I do not need to stress about that) and these colours are the colours for the Union Jack, so instantly the project would be recognisable. On the inside if the needle case I have created an extra design feature, so when you come to stitch the piece you know that it is for the Queens Jubilee, I am so satisfied that I sewed this piece and I was able to create it.

  • 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 was published in 1934 and has listed cable stitch as a heading over the stitch and then in the paragraph has said it is also known as cable chain stitch, other publications have changed things around and named the stitch accordingly. I suppose as I have had Mary Thomas book on my shelves for a long time as I purposefully bought her book when I started on my city & guilds embroidery a few decades ago, that I would naturally be loyal to her.