The girl who ate the dragon is the catwalk theme of Hector Maclean. I saw the body suit in Hector’s studio and collaborated with Hector in sending my learners to him to do industry experience of sewing satin stitch and couching to create dragons that would later be sewn onto the jump suit. Charlie and Gulsah were asked to work together on the dragon designs, I think Charlie may have done all the illustrations and Hector would have chosen the dragon images he wanted embroidered, they worked on Hector’s collection for two months.

Gulsah “Hector changed the position of the dragon, so mine is the right bust and left leg. It was very tough doing these dragon embroideries. I was working nine hours each day over a three-week period, as the designs kept changing.”

Charlie ” It has been quite stressful this time working with Hector as he kept changing his mind for the colourways. I wanted to do my best and bought DMC embroidery floss so I could match the colours to Gulsah’s dragons so they looked on point”

Working with a fashion designer on a live catwalk show is quite stressful, not many people see the artisans working diligently behind the scenes creating the most amazing pieces of embroidery to wow.

I do say to my embroidery learners why do they want to do embroidery and most of the learners I teach say to help improve their mental health and it does as when you are looking at the embroidery while sewing, that is all you can think about. When I am sitting embroidering away I feel calm and relaxed and enjoying the process of placing the needle into the fabric and bringing it up again and creating a beautiful piece of embroidery.

I also say to the cohorts of embroidery learners that come to be taught by me, that embroidery is not for the faint hearted as I do put them through it in creating interesting homework for them to learn their stitches that they need to complete and return to me the following week. I teach uncredited courses and have my learners for either a 10 or 11 week term depending on other commitments I have at the time, so week 1 we hit the ground running and after all the inductions are completed and information regarding safeguarding is spoken about we start to embroiderer.

This story tore me to the core and it was Blackheath Embroidery Group who invited the keeper of the Musumofsexualobjects into the meeting as that session was covering pollical embroidery. I didn’t quite understand at the time the journey I would embark on, but the girls helped me choose a subject and then I had to figure out an image that I wanted to stitch. I decided on a sanitary towel as Child Q was totally violated at the age of 15, the girl was on her period when she was stripped search!

I set about drawing sanitary towels and as you can see from the image I drew another image to represent blood in the middle of the white sanitary towel. I stitched the piece in straight stitch, this piece is with the keeper of the Museum of Sexual Objects, unfortunately I couldn’t go to the exhibition as I was then in recovery from a sprained ankle and broken right wrist.

I remember it really hurt my wrist as I continued to stitch the piece, but I was so fired up that I kept stitching as I needed to get the pain of the violation out of me. I was happy with my result.