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Welcome to my stitchy site.
I am a textile artist who also teaches in the Manchester and surrounding areas. All photos will be of my own work. I will also post some of my students’ work with their permission. I run classes on all aspects of stitched textiles. I am a qualified adult educator with a City and Guilds qualification in embroidery and design. You can contact me via this blog. I hope you will enjoy this blog as much as I enjoy textile work.
Ok, so the big news is that the Year of Stitch piece is now finished, and I definitely WON’T be doing another one for 2018. However, I might set myself some goals for sketching and mark making for the new year.
I am also trying to get a few other pieces finished so I can start some new stuff. One which has been hanging around for quite a while now is a piece printed onto sheers, ripped up and which I am now Kantha quilting all over. A lengthy business but one which I hope to finish in the next 2 or 3 days. Watch this space, and Happy New Year.
You know how it is, you wait ages and then two come along together!
This latest offering is a set of ‘inchies’ started at a workshop on Saturday afternoon. Each is a one inch 
square of felt embellished with coloured woollen fibres and edged in blanket stitch.
The challenge? To work them in only one stitch and one thread. So they are all done in variations of chain stitch with the same variegated thread. Ok, I cheated by adding a few beads and sequins. However it is interesting how much it makes you think when you have to find different ways of using the same stitch and on such tiny pieces.
A few days ago a friend of mine reminded me that I haven’t posted anything on here for a while (sorry Chris!). What can I say except that I have no idea where the last couple of months have gone.
I am currently working on a collection of little projects which may eventually become a new day workshop. These stem from a piece of work which I started some time last year but then abandoned for some considerable time. Those who have read my previous blogs will realise that this is a common theme with me!
The original idea came from a Wendy Dolan book. Pieces of neutral coloured fabrics were collected, assembled and machine stitched together. They were then coloured (with silk paints in my case) before providing a background for an appliqué picture on top.
The appliqué bit really didn’t appeal to me, so the coloured background sat around on one of my work surfaces for months. No inspiration at all! Then suddenly I wondered if I might like it more if I trimmed off the edges where the paint hadn’t quite reach and bound them. This done, and a nice bold running stitch worked round the edge, and I was ready to get going.
Bling was added with some painted bondaweb and transfer foil, then I could really let rip with some simple but dense running stitch which was used a basis for Banjara quilting. A few sequins to ensure enough sparkle and I now have a lovely, heavily textured mat for one of my occasional tables. I think this could be adapted to make smaller items such as coasters, mug rugs, etc. Watch this space!
OK, so not as much progress recently due to summer breaks away. However, the embroidered chip paper idea came in handy again. Remember I had two chip papers? Well the second is now looking very much the same as the first, it was an easy project to take away and finish within a week as I already knew what threads to take. It is now mounted and ready to go to a new home. No photo as it looks remarkably like the first!
However, I recently went to a workshop led by Liz Smith. We had to take a photo of a landscape or garden, remove part of it and then replace with fabric and stitch. I’m not sure how I managed it, but I forgot to take any fabric. Put it down to a senior moment maybe. So I improvised with some papers instead. I took a photo of my garden to work on and the results are in the photo. With hindsight (which is a wonderful thing) I think I would have been better to take a simpler image of a distant landscape. This would have given a less fussy result with more impact – sometimes ‘less is more’. Never mind, at least I have an image of my garden in full summer growth to remind me over the coming winter months.
This is what it looks like (didn’t seem to load with the last message).
At Embroiderers Guild the first Saturday in July we had an all-day workshop led by Joy and Pam. The idea was to use gesso and/or modelling paste on calico to create surfaces for stitch. It was a nice versatile and quick technique, so I came home with quite a few samples, all white paste on natural calico background. All the samples were quite small and different odd shapes.
I was a bit underwhelmed by them to be honest. However, there was a little voice at the back of my mind saying ‘Just carry on, at least they can’t get worse’. So firstly I made them all into rectangles of different widths but the same height. That at least satisfied my need for order! Then I painted them with acrylic, even added transfer foil or painted bondaweb to a few and tidied the edges with a zigzag on the machine.
Enthusiasm having returned a bit, I then doodled on each with a bit of stitch. By this stage I was getting to quite like them, thought they could make nice teaching samples, but how to present them? The final flourish was to stitch them together into a zigzag ‘book’. I am really pleased with the result and will post up some of the individual ‘pages’ in future posts, but for now here is the completed book.
It just shows that sometimes it is worth persevering even when you aren’t feeling particularly inspired. 
Having checked with Whitby Seafoods that it is ok to exhibit the embroidered greaseproof, they have posted it up on their Facebook and Instagram pages. What fun!
Since 1 January I have been following (and doing) the Year of Stitch 2017 online (see their Facebook group). The idea is to stitch every day and to post each Sunday. Thousands of folk from all over the world started and it is lovely to see the posts arriving each week, starting in Australia and gradually working around to the Americas.
Like all these things, it is difficult to do things every single day. I will admit to having ‘catch up’ sessions every few days and I probably post my progress about once a month.
I am currently stitching the August segment of my chosen circular design. I am trying to incorporate bits of stitch which will remind me of events over the year, hence this month a tiny piece of patchwork reminds me of my trip to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC. The image shows August ‘in progress’ also (working left to right) July, June and a little bit of May.
So your challenge is to try and identify some of the events that inspired the stitching. Good luck!
So… one week on and I have a new piece for the ‘Re-use, Recycle’ exhibition coming up at the beginning of October. After a bit of concentrated crumpling, not only did the paper take dye, but also accepted some painted bondaweb and quite a lot of stitching. Loved doing the oystercatcher! 
Last Saturday (5 August) was the Day of Stitch. A small group of diehards from Manchester Embroiderers’ Guild met and stitched in a beautiful garden in Didsbury. Of course, afterwards we popped off to the pub where some of us continued stitching over lunch. Some lovely work was being done, but what really took my eye was the way the scampi and chips were served. The scampi came in little metal buckets lined with printed gresproof paper. Although I didn’t actually have the scampi, guess who went home with two of the papers, muttering ‘I wonder if it will take dye’. 
hilstitch 