Yesterday on the Vetty Creations Facebook page I asked readers what their favourite stitch was. I think mine would be Palestrina stitch because of all the things you can do with it.
What’s your favourite embroidery stitch and why?
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This morning through my Google Alerts, I found that a blogger named Kath Rimmer has very kindly written a review of The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion. You can read her review on her blog: kathrimmer.wordpress.com An excerpt:
Thanks Kath, and I’m so glad you’ve found the book helpful!
I am enjoying it, and am pleased at how quickly it is moving on. I still don’t think my stitching is very good! Room for improvement… 🙂
It’s a little hard to tell what much of it is. The long bit sticking out the lower side of the bird is not a leg – it’s a branch! In time it will all start to come together. That background is actually green. Not that you’d know it from my dreadful photo! On occasions I can see that my technique is improving, and then it goes back to being pretty awful. You’re not supposed to be able to see any of the stitches at all. I’m not very good at that yet. 🙂 Just so you know, this is a complete detour from what I’m working on for my next book. It is completely unrelated. This is for personal interest only, and I have no plans to design any appliqué projects in the near future. It’s just something I’d been wanting to learn. I had a lovely weekend in Mittagong teaching Mountmellick embroidery at Quilting in the Highlands. I had a full class and we had a great time! The students made good progress with learning new stitches and then getting them onto their cushion front. One part of a Mountmellick class that I really enjoy is helping students troubleshoot the issues they’ve been having with various stitches. Because most of the stitches are common to other sorts of embroidery, it is not unusual when I introduce a stitch for at least someone to say “Oh, I can’t do that stitch.” “YES, you can, or you will be able to soon!” It was great to see people so much happier with their bullion knots, coral knots, palestrina knots, satin stitch… and the list goes on. As with last year, the food for the weekend was excellent, and the staff at the venue are always so helpful. On the Saturday night, we had a special dinner at which the tutors were all introduced and there was a display of some of our work. The quilts of the other tutors (I’m the only one who isn’t a quilter!) were simply beautiful. I was originally going to have a class on the Monday and Tuesday, but it didn’t go ahead. Instead, Tamsin and Sue from Berrima Patchwork (the organisers and powerhouses behind QITH) offered for me to do a morning in Sandra Leichner’s class. Sandra was back for a second year of tutoring at Quilting in the Highlands (as was I). She is an incredibly talented hand appliqué specialist, who also utilises embroidery details on her quilts. She was a bit daunted by having me, an embroidery teacher, in her class. I told her not to be silly – I was there to learn needle turn appliqué! And I did. 🙂 I enjoyed the morning SO much. I had attempted a little bit of needle turn appliqué just to try it out, after last year’s QITH. Sandra said my attempts were pretty good. But yesterday she showed me how it was really done (thank you!) and the details of some of the trickier bits, like inverted Vs with no bulk, and points with no bulk. I did a leaf with points that I was pretty happy with, and there were no little whiskers hanging out either! I’ve decided that seeing I worked over the weekend, I’m going to give myself a few days off to continue working on the little wren design that I started. It is The Wren Block which Sandra taught last year. Hers is brown, but I’ve adapted mine to be a blue wren – because that’s one of our Australian birds which I love. Hopefully completing the design in the next few days will mean that the techniques I learned will be cemented in my head, rather than leaving it until after I finish this book that I’m working on. Also, I’m pretty realistic about this – if I don’t do it now, I’ll probably never get back to it to finish it! I’ve just realised that although I took some photos of Sandra’s work, I didn’t actually take one of the block I’m doing! You can see it using the link above to Sandra’s website, and scroll down through the patterns to find it. If you’re interested in purchasing one of the patterns, they’re available in Australia exclusively through Berrima Patchwork, or you can order through Sandra’s website. So, while I didn’t get a picture of Sandra’s wren, I did get one of her purple finch block. (I have permission to post this, and wouldn’t post it otherwise.) I think I’ll have a fun few days working on this appliqué block, and then I’d better get back to real life and work on my book again! This weekend I’ll be off to Mittagong for the 2014 Quilting in the Highlands retreat organised by Berrima Patchwork. Mittagong is in the Southern Highlands, south of Sydney. Given that it is winter in Australia at the moment, it’s a bit cold, and in winter it is always colder in the Southern Highlands. We don’t get snow in Sydney, but they do sometimes get snow down there. I’m not sure that we’re expecting snow this weekend though! I’ll be teaching a Mountmellick class on Saturday and Sunday. The class is full, which will be lovely. I’m sure we’ll have lots of fun learning and playing with stitches! You’re right if you’re thinking “Mountmellick isn’t quilting”, but the organisers are very happy to provide embroidery classes, because embroidery can be used on quilts. This year (I was a teacher for the 2013 retreat as well) there are more teachers and more classes. There are some dinners organised in the evenings for entertainment, and each of the teachers will have a display of their work. I’ll take some Mountmellick with me, and also some of my Sardinian projects. We’re guaranteed to have a wonderful weekend. If you’re coming along to my class, I look forward to meeting you and spending some fun time together!
I could do a giveaway here, but Mary has a much larger audience than me, and why not give as many people as possible the chance to win?! You’ve got to be in it to win it! As a refresher of what’s in the book, why not watch the book trailer? If you receive this post via email, you can see the video at YouTube. Yesterday I decided it was time to try out a scary new stitch on the embroidery that I’ve been working on. It’s a stitch that’s been on my radar for quite some time, but I’d been too scared to try it. It involved cutting threads and then working very close to unfinished ends. That scared me! I decided that the best way to prepare for it (and to procrastinate a little further, but productively!) was to work some counted tacking to lay out where the stitching was going to sit. This was such a worthwhile thing to do! It means that I can go along cutting these threads feeling confident that I’m not going to get to the end of the line of stitching and realise that I’m one thread out. In the afternoon, after doing a whole lot of family stuff in the morning, I finally got around to actually starting the stitching proper. I don’t know what I was scared about! It’s fine! You don’t really work that close to unfinished ends at all. With the help of a pin to keep thread ends out of the way, it works very well. Sure, it isn’t a beginner’s stitch, but then I’m not a beginner, and neither are many of the people who use my books. I feel quite confident that I’ll be able to successfully write instructions that will produce successful results for those who will stitch it from my book. And, I love the look of it! I’m looking forward to doing more of it today. 🙂 Thank you to all who commented on the blog, on FB or emailed me privately yesterday in support of my blog post. I really was terribly unsure about posting it. Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth, and I wasn’t sure if this was one of those cases. It was encouraging to hear from others who felt that what I had to say was very worthwhile. Thanks. With the craft show over, I’ve resumed working on my next book. It is lovely to be doing it again. After having both left- and right-handed stitch instructions in the Sardinian book, I am thinking that that is what will be expected of my books from now on. It really will make them terribly useful for everyone, so that is what I am planning. In the daytime, apart from filling orders, I’ve been working on the stitch diagrams and instructions, and in the evenings I’ve been stitching while we watch old episodes of “The West Wing”. We don’t have a TV (and haven’t in all the years we’ve been married) so we’re catching up on old shows via DVD viewed on a computer. We’ve almost exhausted our local library’s stock of British crime dramas (they seem to specialise in them!), so we’ve moved on to our first American show. We’re quite enjoying it, and I get a lot of stitching done while I watch/listen. I’ve been toying with the idea of this post, and I’m still not really sure about it. I don’t know what you’ll think of it, and I don’t really even know what I think of it. However, perhaps it needs saying. Yesterday I received an email from an Australian reader who loves my books: “I read Mary Corbets revue and will order the new book from The Book Depository ! Why can I get a book written by an aussie cheaper from the uk ? Sorry but it is really a lot cheaper ! I do hope that you are getting something from this sale or are they ‘robbing’ you of your money ?” From time to time I get asked why someone would choose to buy a book from me when they can get it so much cheaper elsewhere. How do I answer this? A consumer is entitled to buy from wherever they want. Firstly, let me say that I am not having a go at the reader who sent me this question. It is a legitimate question that others have also asked or no doubt thought. Secondly, I am not having a go at Book Depository (or any other large book seller). They have a different business model than I do. They are a *large* business, and my business is very small, consisting of just me! I charge postage on books ordered from my website. (Just to be clear, the price you see on my website *includes* postage, whereas other websites add it later.) I can’t absorb postage costs. If large booksellers choose to absorb shipping costs, they obviously run their business with a different business model than I do. For the price of the book (excluding the postage) I charge what I consider to be a reasonable amount in compensation for the quality of my books. I suggest a recommended retail price within Australia, but I actually have no control over what other retailers charge for my books. They may choose to compete solely on price, which means they charge less. I don’t want to do that, because I know the amount of work that goes into my books! When selling books, an author/publisher makes a choice. They can sell directly to the public, thereby cutting out any middlemen, and giving a higher return. They can sell their books to distributors, who require a large discount in return for buying large quantities of books. Distributors require a large discount, because they then sell to retailers. The retailer usually expects to make a good amount of profit on each item they sell. The distributor also wants to add their cut so that they get a return too. That’s why they require deep discounting – because both they and the retailer want (and deserve) to make some money on the sale. An author can sell more books by using distributors (who in turn sell to retailers). They sell many more books than I could ever expect to without them. I just don’t have their reach. Some people choose to buy their books from me, because they know that by doing that, I get a higher percentage of the profit. Others choose to buy their books elsewhere such as from one of the large booksellers or from a local needlework shop. Unless it is a second-hand book, I do receive some return, though it is much lower. Either way, you are supporting my business and helping me to continue to write more books. (Thank you!) We all make choices about how to spend our money. There are consequences of those choices. Some people like to support small businesses, even if they know it costs them more. Others prefer to spend their hard-earned money as carefully as they can. Each choice is valid. |
White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations' quality needlework books and embroidery products.
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