I’m very fond of stained glass, as you might have guessed from my overexcitement about the stained glass windows at St Vitnus Cathedral in Prague. While I’d be hard pressed to say if I preferred historical or modern pieces, one of the nice parts about modern pieces is that they have utterly vibrant colours although one of the joys about the methods in which stained glass is coloured means that many pieces do not really fade with time and exposure to light.
My brain feels a bit like scrambled eggs at that moment… which may well explain today’s piece of machine embroidery! My completely obsessive love of over-challenging myself seems to have found new heights in my work and it’s very much this mix of being hugely excited by a lot of what is going on and going well, but also very much wanting a nap. Maybe now I’m at the point of embroidering people pigeons for their birthday cards I should perhaps consider the latter!
Last week was the exhibition that accompanies the Hand and Lock Prize for Embroidery, which is a seriously lavish celebration of embroidery talent. There are several categories to the prize, including Fashion and Textile, with Open and Student levels. Whether you love all the individual exhibition pieces or not, there is no denying that the Prize attracts a veritable cornucopia of talent and is the ultimate ‘up yours’ to anyone who doesn’t think embroidery can be art.
First of all, thank you for your very lovely comments last week. I am very lucky to have such kind readers! I’m afraid I don’t have perhaps the prettiest of posts today, but it is on one of my favourite subjects, colour. One of the joys of playing with embroidery is not just playing with threads, textures and shapes but also playing with colours. Machine embroidery threads come in a really dazzling array of choices and I will say I have been building up quite the collection, but it’s still never really enough…
Well, I had rather hoped that my last post would mark a return to a regular schedule of blogging fun but it seems that was too optimistic. Normally, I find writing here very straightforward and a lot of fun as it’s the one place I just get to ‘write’ without worrying about briefs, absolute technical precision and everything everyone else has written on a topic in the last hundred years. Recently, though it feels like I’ve been suffering with a bit of ‘writer’s block’ which is very unusual!
lThank you all for your very lovely and thoughtful comments last week. Interesting as well to see how many of you also felt that you didn’t want to blog about the ‘thing we talk about all the time but don’t really want to discuss’. I’m afraid it’s not quite shiny things for this week’s outing, but is an adventure in digitising and the joy that are ESA fonts.
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There’s nothing better when you embark on some new crafty journey then buying a good book. While they’re heavy, bulky and completely inconvenient when compared to digital files but I still vastly prefer paper and ink to their digital counterparts. I like it even more when said books prove to be excellent references that you come back to time and time again. When it comes to machine embroidery though, where is the best place to start?
I’d had such a great experience with the badge felt at the class at London Embroidery Studio that I’ve been scouring the internet to try and find a supplier of something similar. This is always a challenge when you just have a sample of the material and you can’t exactly touch and check things online… Plus, I am always quite surprised how few places stock machine embroidery supplies. I guess this is partly as a lot of places that do cater more for the commercial end, so while 200 m of stabiliser sounds great, it’s probably not something you want to live with!
I have something very, very exciting to blog about this week… a patch making course at the utterly brilliant London Embroidery Studio!!! This was really a very perfect day and course and if you want some added context for how unusual all of this was… I actually really like the patches I made!
Half the fun of blogging is sharing with people not when things go right, but when things go horribly wrong. I feel it’s a public service when I can make mistakes so you don’t have to. This week’s incident involved giving the Bernina a good, fabric meal to chew on…
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