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.
I have invested in a course to improve my machine embroidery skills that I learnt over twenty years ago. Each month there is a new project to be working on and modules at the start of the course, this is from module 1 to be free motion embroidery on a sewing machine a flower. The flower design was nice, but I decided to freehand draw it into my sketchbook which was not great, so when I came to transfer the pattern onto tracing paper using a sulky pen, I adapted it to be more free flowing. What I didn’t realise is that once the pattern is ironed onto the fabric after multiple times the pattern disappears, also when I first iron the pattern, I had the heat set to medium which was for a polyester setting and the highest heat is for cotton, which calico is of course.
You can see a seam in the calico and that is because instead of using a new piece of calico I wanted to upcycle and reuse the toile of a waistcoat or vest as the Americans would say and I am exploring designs and ideas to do machine embroidery onto garments again. It has been taking me an age to be doing practice for machine embroidery which I cannot always do due to whether there is energy or if I am experiencing the bananas, (my replacement word for fatigue that I experience on a regular basis as I am recovering from long covid or cfs which are one and the same thing I think).
Below shows the underside of the toile, sometimes it is good to see the back of the embroidery to double check that the tension is correct.
I have signed up to be part of free motion embroidery with Vania Santos from Wardrobe School. It has been a while since I have been sewing machine embroidery and creating my own designs.
You can see I have been playing around with zig zag to make it more like satin stitch and straight stitch, the circular stitches are called granite stitch, they are a little more tricky as you need control of the embroidery hoop while sewing the circles, they can go in either direction of anti clockwise or clockwise direction.
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 had the opportunity to set up a course for a client who asked me to teach her embroidery. I choose to teach crewelwork for beginners as stitching with yarn is a much faster process that stitching with embroidery thread and it is always good for the client to see a fast approach in creating something tangible in their hands. It is like the hook to getting them started and falling in love with the process of slow stitch.
As I came to set up the table to deliver the course, I remembered I had a plastic stand for a price list and another plastic display unit that I had used when selling my products at Greenwich Market and I used both to create a stand to place the camera handle. You may be thinking why am I writing about this and the reason is that I have set up a YouTube channel to create videos of the products that I am teaching on and my first video on Sewing with Samines has quite a few thuds in the video and having a discussion with a friend about this issue he suggested that if the microphone is part of the video camera and too close to me when I am demonstrating I may need another video camera. So I wanted to see how this worked, unfortunately due to the client having to go to an emergency meeting this morning I did not get the chance to see if this would work. So, I will start the process again when I next meet up with her.
So lets get back to the display units, I had an idea to anchor with a bag of pasta and lentils to put under the display units to anchor them as they were toppling over and it also good for me to see how I need to set up future meetings going forward.
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).
