Puffin Commission Who doesn’t love puffins? With their brightly coloured beaks and funny walk, what’s not to adore about these cute little seabirds? I was recently commissioned to do a puffin embroidery based on the customer’s photo from a trip to Iceland where he spotted lots of wildlife. This puffin was posing on a cliff […]

Since I was a small child I’ve always loved kingfishers. This piece ‘The Summer of the Kingfishers’ is inspired by the place down by the river where we used to go to play in the summer and have picnics. And it is where my father used to go as a child, where he learned to […]

  ‘Peacock on a Hilltop’ is a small silk painting embroidered by machine using free machine embroidery and by hand too. I’ve used some rayon and stranded cotton threads for the hand stitching (feather stitch and fly stitch. I’ve added lots and lots of sequins to build up the layers of textures especially on the […]

This little kingfisher started out as a very vague silk painting. I used acrylic inks to create a mottled background and the rough outline of the bird. I wanted the bird to merge with the background to some degree, so I didn’t make the outline too crisp. I had an idea in my head of […]

My mother was the first person to really help and inspire me with embroidery. She was the one who made me my first sewing kit, some of which I still have. A little needlecase in the shape of a hat, the crown holding a thimble, a cover for a small pair of scissors and a […]

I’ve tried to recapture the sense of decoration and opulence I experience while visiting the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. There was so much pattern everywhere, it was quite overwhelming. Not only were there mosaics but also very elaborate plasterwork, and patterned wooden doors with large metal studs. There were also beautiful gardens full of flowers […]

Shimmer shimmer shimmer. It’s taking forever to “sequinize” this peacock embroidery.

I only found out about “World Embroidery Day” from the Mahila Community on facebook a few days ago – it was started last year by the Swedish Embroiderer’s Guild Broderiakademin. Here is the Embroidery Manifesto (PDF file in English – opens in a new window).  I love the emphasis on peace; in a turbulent world, creating […]

Stitches are like plants: they grow organically if you let them, springing forth from the fertile ground of furrowed fabric. Texture upon texture, like blades of grass and stems of weeds, clashing and clustering, bending, weaving and tangling, the threads begin to create their own landscape. A wayside border of adornment that casts its own […]

The weather has been so warm and sunny recently (hip hip hooray!) that I’ve been feeling the need to use lots more yellow in my textile experiments – to be truthful the urge to use yellow started last year when we went to Andalucia and were submerged into a wonderful world of sunbaked olive groves, […]