Hello friends!
Sending you the biggest waves of warm sunshine and bubbly happiness on this wonderful Friday morning
🌞❤️🥰
Today is an important newsletter, it may even save your life one day. Read on.
The longer I teach and design patterns and create kits the more I am inspired to put all my creativity into your hands. Like a stack of fabrics that I have in abundance, I imagine myself picking it up and plonking it in your lap.
I’ve realised that a big part of the joy that hand embroidery brings with it is the part where:
you feel like your work is flowing 😎
you’re making awesome progress 🥳
it’s all working out 😋
And a big part of the frustration is when:
you get stuck on a decision 😫
you find something confusing 🤔
you find something too difficult 😰
I want you to experience the first part, not the second part. But even with expertly designed patterns, clearly written instructions, supporting videos, you might still find that you come up with issues.
On the one hand that’s not a big deal, problems happen in any craft but if you have a solid grasp of the craft itself you can usually work your way out.
This is why I’ve started these weekly videos on my pink top. I can’t hand you “ease” and “flow” and “ability-to-solve-every-problem” in one video or one PDF pattern.
But these small demonstrations are designed especially to train your decision making muscle when it comes to embroidery.
How? Like this…
When you draw your own leaf (not trace from a pattern) and then stitch it, you’ll be able to see that drawing that shape leaf in that size can be filled in these types of stitches. When you do that regularly with stems, leaves, flowers in different shapes you start to see repeating decisions you’re making like:
this shape is too wide for a satin stitch, I’ll divide it in half and fill it with buttonhole stitch
this is a sharply curved line, it’ll look better in a Portuguese stem stitch
these little circles can easily be filled in clusters of French knots
This gives you super powers my friends!
It means that any pattern you pick up in the future you can glance over it, omit some motifs, add extra motifs, swap out stitches and choose what to follow from the instructions and what to skip.
It’s the kind of power I wish I had for knitting! Thankfully I have it for embroidery and it’s totally teachable.
With that said, I want you to read the “Close Up'“ section below and look at the drawing diagram. And if you follow the video and draw and stitch this flower I would love to know how you went. You can leave me a comment below.
(I know sometimes I take a week to reply to comments! argh! It’s because I’m busy making awesome content for you! haha! 😂)
Close up
In case you didn’t know…
every week that I share the 10 minute stithicng tutorial and below diagram, I also show you how to free-hand draw the design.
I wanted these weekly stitch alongs to be simple enough that you didn’t have to download anything or print any patterns or transfer anything using carbon paper.
Which meant that I had to make the drawing super simple but still make it interesting.
If you haven’t stitched along with me yet (it’s fine, I won’t take it personally 🙄) I’d invite you to just watch the tutorial as I show you how you can draw this flower by yourself.
I won’t hear any excuses like: “I can’t draw to save my own life!”
In fact, I’ll do one better in case you’ve already decided that you’re SO BAD at drawing that there’s no point even clicking on the video tutorial.
I’ve made the below step by step, so just look at it and you’ll see that you can draw.
So in case one day you’re in a situation where drawing could save your life, you can pull this out from your memory and thank me later.
If this is your first time seeing this, we’re up to week 6 of an ongoing project. You can see the start in issue 79.
Maker Of The Week
- My aunt Elizabeth -
I know I’ve shared Elizabeth’s work before but I visited her a couple of weeks ago in Jervis Bay and delighted in all the new things she’d stitched since the last time we saw each other.
I especially loved this blouse which she bought and thought a bit plain so she decided to add some stitches over the printed flowers.
The embroidery truly transformed the design and you can see it in the bottom two photos which shows a before and after.
The stitches are basic, it’s mostly back stitch and stem stitch and she just focused on outlining the flowers adn a few stems. The impact is striking not to mention the gorgeous texture that the blouse now has.
From The Tribe
I was delighted to see these two projects from Bronwyn and Sandie who are both members of The Wednesday Tribe. They both took the months design and created their very own version of it. I chose these because they both used just one main colour for the whole design. I know Sandie added a bit of red to her cushion but it is mainly navy blue. I don’t often see single colour embroideries so it was super interesting to see how beautifully these turned out.
Bronwyn will turn this into a bag which I’ll show you again when she finishes and sends me a photo. it looks so elegant with the dark green linen and ecru threads.
Sandie made this cushion as a gift for her sons birthday. I take my hat off to her because the design itself is repeated four times on the cushion, that’s a lot of work! I love the way she connected them all with the single flower in the middle.
If you’re curious about The Wednesday Tribe you can read all about it here…
Till Next Week!
Last Friday, if you recall, was Johnny’s birthday which ended up spilling out over three days! On Sunday afternoon I said “The festival of Johnny is over, we’re having salad for dinner!” haha! We were both spent but had a wonderful three days celebrating.
On Friday we went out to an absolutely awesome restaurant which I can’t recommend enough, it’s called Eleven Barrack and it’s in Martin Place in Sydney. I’ve included a photo of me below at the restaurant about to tuck into my entree (yuuuum!)
I’m sharing it because that top I’m wearing is a cheap, thrifted top I found in a second hand shop years ago. The ‘embroidery’ isn’t really embroidery. It’s a kind of ribbon thing machine stitched onto black fabric.
I haven’t worn it in ages and when I dug it up and put it on, can you guess what I thought…?
“I could embroider one with my own design on it in my spare time…”
🤣😂
OK the “spare time” is funny, BUT I’m just sowing a seed, not going to dive into a project like this (yet)… Although I do already have an idea how this could be done fairly quickly…
(famous last words)
I’d better end this newsletter before I commit to making this before Christmas haha!
