After the success of my last monogrammed card, and as part of the greetings card factory that is now my apartment, I wanted to have a go at digitising and stitching out a more complex design… and including my favourite thing, more metallic thread. This design is a very simplified version of a beautiful cadel by Elen Verch Phelip and you can see some more of her amazing work on her website here. She seems to be a person of limitless talents!
Apart from a recent jaunt down to the London Embroidery School for the rest of their Lace Series course, the number of in-person craft courses going on has been rather lamentable so I was very pleased to see that the weekend Lampshade Making course at Minerva Studios was still going ahead, albeit with some health and safety upgrades.
Maybe it’s the dour dark nights of winter drawing in already but I’ve been finding myself really craving working with fibre. It’s been a struggle not to cast something new one the needles, but I have had the wheel out and some delightful yak for a bit of sampling work I hope to share soon. Somewhat dangerously, I did end up going to the virtual Indie Untangled Trunk Show, which is probably what inspired the current bit of dyeing.
As you might have noticed, I’ve been having a lot of fun with machine embroidery and one of the things I have been trying to do is explore all of the possibilities with the technique just to start building up some breadth of experience. I’ve recently invested in an assortment of different stabilisers and one of the things I was very keen to try was making freestanding lace, which requires dissolvable stabilisers.
Monograms are incredibly popular motifs with machine embroidery. With the speed of digital embroidery, it’s a quick way to transform a boring generic item into something a bit more special and personal. I absolutely love illuminated letters and fancy lettering too and really think they can easily be a work of art in themselves.
It would be remiss of me to talk about today’s trip to a craft shop without mentioning its absolutely beautiful surroundings. Today we’re going to take a trip to Split, in the Dalmatia region of Croatia and probably one of the most effortlessly beautiful places I have ever been.
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Sadly all good things must come to an end, including the London Embroidery School’s Lace Series course but at least it ended with another nice technique, Limerick lace. Like a lot of laces, it was something I recognised, but never knew the name for and it was a really interesting experience to get the chance to work on a new ground fabric, net.
Machine embroidery is a lot of fun and there’s a huge wealth of designs out there that come both with the machine and are available either for free or a small price. As I did for my previous monogrammed card, these designs can be combined either on the machine itself or using some embroidery design software.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you make any purchases via these links, I receive a small commission that contributes to the running costs of the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here.
2020 has certainly been a year. I am very much used to living in a perpetual state of chaos with my love of overcommitting myself to all possible things and deciding that one shouldn’t just dream about as many as six impossible things before breakfast, but actually get out and try and do them. What I am not so used to is dealing with a huge amount of external disruption to this chaos-balancing exercise and one of the many things that has suffered along the way has been my attempt to bring order and control to my craft room.
Do you remember that time when we used to go to classes? Where sewing groups would meet, exchange biscuits, gossip and the best way to stop unruly seams from rolling? Those halcyon days? Well, lucky me, because I recently got to head back to the basement of the London Embroidery School for a spot of Broderie Anglaise, where I started their Lace Series Course what seems like a couple of lifetimes ago.
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