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odds and ends

I have been enjoying continuing with all my bullion embroidery. I never expected to enjoy it this much, but am finding several things:

that my first impressions of the style of embroidery are lasting – it remains as beautiful to me as I first thought it was that practice really does bring improvement when stitching [...]

Practicing what you preach

Yesterday I was sitting the backyard enjoying the gorgeous weather, working on some more bullions. I realised that the needle that I was using was a darner needle, and not a milliner’s needle. As you know, I, along with many other teachers of embroidery recommend that milliner’s needles (also known as straw needles) are the [...]

what do you do when its not working?

Quite often I’ll be working on an embroidery design, and I can feel that its just not working right. Something isn’t right. Sometimes I KNOW where the problem is, and sometimes its hard to know what’s the problem.

Often I try to ignore it and hope that with the finished product it will all just [...]

Christmas humbug

Well, that title has really Dickensian overtones, doesn’t it?!

About a week ago I posted about an idea I was having for adapting my Christmas decoration into a tetrahedron or triangular pyramid shape. I was reliably informed by several commenters that this shape is now referred to as a humbug, due to the resemblance to [...]

me time

I decided that despite having a few projects that are just a little bit pressing, yesterday I needed ME time. I needed to feel like I was making progress on MY projects for my book on Portuguese whitework.

And so after racing off in the morning to the toy sale at a local department store [...]

shadow work

In the next little while I have a few more projects – not for my book, unfortunately – that I need to get done. I have another piece of clothing that I need to embellish for Embellish magazine. Its a light and floaty fabric, which to me just says “shadow work please”. So I might [...]

The Gift of Stitching ornament

Every year at about this time The Gift of Stitching Magazine puts out its annual Christmas ornament issue, and this year I’m in it! You can sort of see my ornament in the top left corner of the cover, right behind the “o”.

I started designing it when I was at the craft show that [...]

blackwork admiration

Yesterday I spent the day working on diagrams for a blackwork project for a magazine. Its not one of my designs though – I’m just the technical illustrator.

I found myself full of admiration for people who design blackwork filling patterns. Working out the stitching order of the double running stitch (also known as Holbein [...]

a different type of stitching

A few years ago, we visited friends for a week. The husband is a gynaecologist and sometimes videos himself operating, for later reference. He wanted to show us some of his videos. Not surprisingly, we declined that opportunity! We did joke about comparing stitching techniques though.

Yesterday afternoon we were relaxing at home. I was [...]

Coloured contours

On Monday evening I went to the opening of the Stitch+Stitch=Magic exhibition at Craft NSW, in The Rocks, Sydney. My embroidery “Coloured Contours” is part of the exhibition.

As part of the rules, it was not allowed to be previously published, and to me that meant I couldn’t show it to you here on my [...]