A photographer was organised by Islington Council to come to the community centre where I work for myself and my embroidery class to be photographed.
I have an inspiring story, in that I sent three of my girls to Hector Maclean to give them industry experience of working with a fashion designer on a fashion collection for LFW AW 2025. It was an eye opener for them and two of my learners worked on Pretty Queen with the other learner working on the Rosette dress. It was a major learning curve for them as they did not know what to expect with working for a fashion designer, in my classes I create the project that consists of a design, the stitches I want to teach that term and then the actual physical product, also we work a lot with calico as the budget stretches to that.
It felt right for summer 2025 that I needed to help Hector with his beading for the collection SS’26, it was a great opportunity for my creative juices to flow to increase my own ideas for private work. I was able to work on the “Beaded blood spinal cord” and the “Dragon eye dress”.
I have created two videos that gives you the chance to experience what it is like as an embroidery designer working on a collection and then being part of the fashion show. Sewing with Samines
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.
