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).
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.
I had a very crazy idea that I acted on, I asked Hector Maclean if he needed help with his collection and that I had potentially one or two embroidery learners who may help him, he said yes!
This piece that has been worked on is by Tatu, Hector printed his logo on the grey velvet and asked Tatu to crack on with the gold work. I need to say that Tatu has only been with me since September 2024 and although she is a beginner, she is more of an advanced beginner. I would love to teach how to do gold work, but I would not as for a 10cm square piece it costs roughly £20 for the gold threads and considering I have eight or ten learners depending on the numbers and it is a free course it not realistic in the budget. The piece also has beads sewn in around the inside of the circle and Hector used ribbon from his brothers wedding, I love that detail.
