Samines

I help your hands create something beautiful

Tag: Samines

  • Wendy Dolan Workshop with Blackheath Embroidery

    Wendy Dolan Workshop with Blackheath Embroidery

    I did the all-day workshop with Blackheath Embroiderers; it was a thank you from our group and in celebration of our second-year anniversary since we have become an independent stitch group. The Embroiderer’s Guild closed all its branches as it did not have the finances to support the branches, we were unsure if we would survive, but thankfully everyone involved took to the challenge of meeting online during the pandemic and we have not looked back since.

    You can see from the photos of stages of layering of fabric onto the linen that will eventually become a picture of a painting I did while I was in Silicily in September 20201, the stitching is taking on a life of it’s own and the original picture that I am working from is now only a guide to the colours and not actual shapes, I am loving how the piece is developing every time I stitch it.

    My first initial thoughts were to leave the green satin on the painted background, but when Wendy Dolan had a look at my piece, she suggested to put strips of organza over the satin as then it would soften the piece and she was right in her assessment.

    I am currently working on this piece in building layers of stitching up to create a meadow, but my piece was not of a meadow, but of a green sub and flowers over the wall that was in front of my balcony I was sharing at the time.

  • 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.

  • Samines Red

    When creating this piece I was teaching another workshop online and while waiting as my client was working in her flower crown, I used the time to make another flower. In earlier times before starting to make the satin flowers I used to make corsages on the sewing machine and using ribbons embedded with machine embroidery on rectangular fabric pieces that would be wrapped around around the wrist.

  • Valentines Heart Pin After The Session

    This is my workshop space, top picture is before the workshop and the picture below is during the workshop, I got to go to my happy place, which was sewing embroidery stitches into the centre of the Valentine heart pin to create a unique and creative piece. Anna who attended the workshop said she was quite happy having a private session as she had all the attention and she was happy that she could finish her heart pin within the two hour session.

  • Valentines Heart Pin

    This is a piece of bondaweb that will be posted today for the packs to the workshop for Valentines Heart Pin, what I wanted to share with you was my printer wasn’t playing ball today. My frustration levels started to increase as the pattern for the hearts were not printing out and I switched the printer and computer off a few times to see if it would print. I tried to print from the copy that was on the scanner bed, but when switching the printer and computer back on, I thought lets see if I could print from Word and it did, then I thought let me see if it will print from the saved scan of the heart patterns and it did and I was so happy.

    When I have worked in the office in administration and things went wrong there was always someone on hand to pop over to help me figure things out, but now those days are gone and I am at home trying to figure the technical bits out on my own.

    What did I do so I didn’t get too down, was to shut down the work station, have some lunch, (a break) and come back to it, I think I will have to give myself a lot more breaks, especially with the recovery of my wrist, yesterday I did a marathon of two and half hours on the computer, although great and lots of tasks were completed, afterwards I had sharp pains and I had to do a recovery of finger and wrist exercises and then wrapping the heat pad around it. I have soreness starting in my hand now and so it is time to log off!