White Threads

2011 embroidery classes with Yvette Stanton

I’ll be teaching embroidery at various places around Australia in 2011. I’m really looking forward to it all, as I’ll be teaching new projects and in some new places. I’ll also go back to some places I’ve been before, and hopefully meet some students again.

I received word yesterday that my merezhka class at Springwood in January is full! What a great start to the year that will be!

If you liked the look of my sample Portuguese whitework embroidery (shown left) get thee to Brisbane in February! I will be teaching it as a project at All Threads Embroidery on 26-27th.

In September (29-30th) I’ll be in Tasmania teaching Mountmellick embroidery at A Stitch In Time.

I will also be teaching Mountmellick embroidery to three different guild and non-guild groups in the Hunter Valley. That will keep me busy throughout the year.

If you’re interested in me teaching to your group or at your shop, I could probably still fit in one or two more bookings at various points in the year, so get in quick!

website rejig

Yesterday I spent a little bit of time rejigging the front page of www.vettycreations.com.au. It had been bothering me for some time that it was so wordy. There was just too much there for a front page. So I cut out lots of extraneous text and put in a new picture of all our wonderful Vetty Creations embroidery books.

I’m much happier with it now.

(If you find it doesn’t look like what I describe, you might need to refresh your page, and hopefully it will bring in the new version rather than using a cached one.)

I also did a bit of work last night on the books page. When I upgraded my computer programs earlier in the year I got Dreamweaver as part of my software package. Previously I have always coded my website pages by hand, meaning that I wrote them all in HTML, which I have taught myself over the years. Its been long and laborious, but I have a better understanding of how HTML works than I ever expected to!

Dreamweaver is a dream! I’m still only learning it, but I’m really liking it. In working on my books page last night, I found lots of broken code that was really making quite a mess of the file. Sure, it still worked ok, but the code wasn’t very clean. Its much better now!

The other thing I love about Dreamweaver is that I can do image maps. That’s where you have an image, where you click on different parts of it, and those parts link to various places and pages. To give you an idea of what I mean, at the top of this page, there is an image map which takes you to the various pages of my website, such as “books”, “hardanger”, “blog” etc. Instead of being all little separate buttons or images, its all one image, with the code set up so that certain parts of it link to different places.

I *dreamed* of doing this before I had Dreamweaver. But it would have been an absolute nightmare to try to code by hand, so I never even tried.

I created a new image map yesterday. If you go to the front page of the website, you’ll see the five books laying across the page. If you click on each one of those books, you’ll be taken to the individual page for that book. Nifty, isn’t it?! (Well, even if you’re not impressed, I am!)

bouncing ideas

I had a lovely day yesterday, meeting with Janie Hubble for lunch. I NEVER have business lunches, because usually there’s just no-one nearby for me to have them with. But yesterday Janie was in town, and we got together to discuss our joint stand at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair in June next year.

Last year I shared a stall with Kirsten Edwards of The Gift of Stitching Magazine. We really enjoyed our time together, and it worked really well, but given that she’ll have a fairly newborn baby in June next year, she won’t be doing the show. I’d already asked a friend who has a start up business if she’d like to share with me, and then Janie approached me and asked if I would consider sharing with her – the more the merrier!

My lunch with Janie was so much fun. We talked for about 4 hours. We bounced business ideas back and forth, and just talked about life in general. Given that I never get to do this sort of thing normally, it was wonderful to have someone in the same industry to talk over ideas with and discuss the state of the industry. Really inspiring. Yes, I do talk about these sorts of things with my husband, but he’s not in the same industry, so while he’s interested, its not quite the same. As he said, he talks library stuff with me, but its just not quite the same as him talking with another librarian about library stuff.

(He’s just read this over my shoulder and pointed out that sometimes its also useful to talk with someone outside of the industry as they often have a different mindset and can suggest different ideas. Quite true.)

Because Janie and I were in Chatswood and she needed buttons, we visited Tessuti. They have some gorgeous buttons, and of course, they also have gorgeous fabric. I was disappointed with their range of reds yesterday. There just weren’t enough red fabrics. I could have whole walls of red fabrics to drool over. However, it made it much easier to walk out without having bought anything!

I got home very late in the afternoon – the kids were being taken care of elsewhere – with just enough time to make dinner before my husband arrived home with them. A lovely day, with lots of exciting new ideas, and lots to think about and mull over.

Janie, we must do it again! We’ll have such fun in June – I can’t wait!

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 bullion stitch
that using the right needle not only makes it easier, but saves time (when you are working the quantity of bullions I am, every second saved adds up to quite a bit!)

In my spare time I have been working on my knitted fringe for the Mountmellick stitch along, and it is slowly growing. I should have it done soon.

Today I will be having lunch with Janie Hubble of Janie Hubble Designs/The Cat’s Whiskers Design Studio, for us to discuss our joint stand at the craft show in June at Darling Harbour. We may yet have a third person joining us as well, so it could be a real bumper stand!

I sent off a very large order of books to a freight forwarder yesterday to be sent to Search Press in the UK. Sales are going well of all my books, around the world. I also posted my next embroidered garment contribution to Embellish magazine.

And I continue to stitch up more of my little Christmas decorations to give as gifts.

So lots of little things have been happening here, and I am very pleased to say that I am making progress on my next book. As long as that keeps happening, I’ll remain satisfied!

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 best needles for bullion knots.

And here I was, not even using one. Shame on me!

I found some milliner’s needles, chose an appropriate size, and switched to using it. It was SO much more smooth and so much easier to pull the needle through.

A clear sign that I should practice what I preach, and a really useful exercise in realising that I recommend some things for very good reason!

parma embroidery

Parma stitch

A week or two ago I was chatting with a customer on the phone and she asked about Parma embroidery, having seen that Parma stitch was included in my stitch dictionary. Not having actually seen the dictionary yet – she was calling to order one – she wanted to know if it had any information about the style of embroidery. Unfortunately it doesn’t as the book is about stitches not embroidery styles. I can’t imagine how huge the book would have had to be if I had included all that sort of information…!

Instead I suggested that she look up Italian needlework, the blog of my friend Jeanine in Canada, who is a bit of an authority on all things to do with Italian embroidery. Jeanine and I looked into Parma embroidery a little a few years back, but unfortunately never really got very far with it at the time. But when I came to do the stitch dictionaries, it was such an interesting stitch that I knew it had to go in.

After getting off the phone to the customer, I went over to Jeanine’s blog to see if she had anything on Parma embroidery. No, unfortunately she didn’t. But my customer had said that she was really interested in Italian embroidery in general, so despite not being able to find anything on Parma embroidery itself, I felt sure she would really enjoy visiting Jeanine’s blog anyway.

I made a periodic visit to Jeanine’s blog today and lo and behold, what should I find but a recent posting on Parma embroidery! I immediately wondered whether my customer had asked for information and Jeanine had graciously provided it (Jeanine’s like that, you see), but it turns out that it was completely coincidental. It had just been on her list of topics to cover.

Parma stitch is a wonderfully textural stitch made up from a base of three rows of chain stitch with two rows of buttonhole stitch worked into parts of the chain stitch base.

So head on over to Jeanine’s always fascinating blog if you’d like to learn more about Parma embroidery, because the information is now there! 🙂 Its one of the fascinating stitches that is explained, step by step in both The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion, and The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion. The instructions even cover how to handle curves, which can be a little tricky in this stitch.

another ornament variation

I’ve done something.

Yesterday I made my first biscornu. I know, I know! You’re as surprised as I am!

I was sewing up some of my Christmas decorations to give as gifts and I suddenly thought that I should see how it would turn out if I made one into a biscornu. So I did.

I added a gold braid to the edges, which later I realised makes it look a little like I must have stuffed up the joins and therefore covered them over. No, my seams were fine, and I was actually suitably impressed with my corners! (Yes, very modest today…)

I don’t think this is the beginning of any sort of love affair, though I do think its pretty nifty the way that you can take two very flat pieces of fabric and make them into a very un-flat ornament.

I wonder if I can come up with any further adaptations? So far I’ve had the bookmark, the humbug, and now this biscornu.

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 magically come together and be fine. But in my heart of hearts I know that’s just not going to be the case.

When I was working my embroidery Coloured Contours not so long ago, I got to a stage where some diamond stitch that I had put in it was really bothering me. (Its where the curl of double chain stitch now reaches up from the middle bottom.)

I wanted to just leave it and get on with other bits and it would hopefully grow on me. But it didn’t. And so, I carefully cut and pulled it all out, and reworked it with a totally different stitch – the double chain stitch. Immediately I was so much happier with it. It wasn’t jarring anymore.

I’ve been working on a project over the last day or two which just isn’t right. I’ve been hoping that the problem would just go away, but as you know, problems just don’t tend to do that! I know therefore that I am going to have to pull out the problematic area – and I know EXACTLY which bit it is – and figure out a better way of doing it.

How do you get around bits that aren’t working? Do you leave it and let it lead you in a new direction, do you undo it, or do you leave it and forever regret not fixing it? Or is there another option that I haven’t thought of?

I miss Ethiopia

This morning I was greeted by an email in my inbox from a lady in the Kenya Guild of Embroiderers in Nairobi. I didn’t even know that such a guild existed, though I’m pretty sure that there wasn’t a similar group in Addis Ababa. The Kenyan group recently had a workshop in Mountmellick embroidery from a visiting UK teacher, and very much enjoyed it.

Now I am jealous! I would have loved to have visited them while in Ethiopia – Nairobi isn’t so far from Addis – though I know that no opportunity existed at the time. But to be so close, yet so far!

Last week at biblestudy another lady in the group had a letter from a family that we both know in Ethiopia. I sat there during the study looking at the Ethiopian stamps on the envelope feeling my chest constricting and realising that even just looking at those stamps was prompting a reasonably strong emotional response in me. Oh dear, I had to get my emotions under control!

I have written back to the lady in Kenya and asked if she can tell me more about their group. I’d love to know more, and if I find out more, with her permission I look forward to sharing it with you.

problem solving

I was thinking this morning about the nebulous and strange process that is getting inspiration for embroideries. So how does it happen? Where do my ideas come from?

Usually my inspiration comes through having a problem to solve. It could be as simple as the fact that I need to make an embroidered lampshade for my new niece. Or it could be that I have a class coming up and need a new project to teach. Each year I need a new Christmas decoration design.

Sometimes I see a gorgeous thread and want to find a way to use it. Something about the colours or feel of the thread may just spark a gem of an idea, such as “Oooh, that would be perfect for Hardanger embroidery.” Which then means I have a new problem to solve: wanting to design a Hardanger embroidery with that particular thread in mind.

So I guess that mostly its about problem solving – working within a set framework to come up with the best solution possible. The framework may be an embroidery style, or a length of time in which I need to get the project done.

So let’s go through my ideas for my niece’s lampshade.

I purchased a lampshade from my local shops. It already has a shade on it, but I will remove this an re-cover it with my own embroidered fabric. Shape of lamp decided.
I asked my sister what colours she’d like me to use and she showed me some other decorations from my niece’s room that she’d like to match. Colourscheme solved.
In my mind it was a given that I’d do it in shadow embroidery, because I find this an effective style of embroidery for lampshades. Embroidery technique decided.
I considered motifs and as I have just recently completed a curtain in shadow work featuring butterflies, I liked the idea of reusing butterflies. Motifs settled upon, though not actually designed yet. I’ll probably use much simplified butterfly designs than were on the curtain because the curtain was much larger than the lampshade and therefore could be much more detailed.

Of course, all this is without having even done anything much other than think, so a lot could change during the actual process of making! But these are my starting points.

By the way, I apologise for my lack of post yesterday. I wasn’t very well, and its very hard to write something interesting and useful while you’re asleep! 🙂