I’ve picked up a couple of pieces that I’ve been procrastinating about this last week. Firstly the Deborah Mullins piece that we had as a workshop at Lincoln Embroiderers Guild (now Linconshire Textiles), in May 2019. Deborah had done a lot of preparation in advance making up a kit for each of us. There were several colour combinations to choose from, I picked the dark green and brick red felt (top left), which Deborah had hand-felted and tacked to a nice linen(?) backing. Each came with a range of Perlé 3 (thicker) and perlé 5, two colours of fine wire and well-written instructions.

We started with the sabaleh stitch, which is the chevron outlining around the colour changes of the felt, changing the thread colour every four stitches (each side); the closeness of the stitching is altered to get round the curves. The wire was bent into spirals and couched down. The top photo is how far I’d got at the end of the workshop.

I didn’t get back to it until sometime this summer, and finished off the sabaleh stitch around the outer colour change. Sadly Deborah died at the end of 2020. I played around with putting her name and dates in the red section of felt. I’ve known her since our son and her youngest two were babies, catching up spasmodically at various stitching events and exhibitions over the years once the children started school and she moved out of the area. In the end I decided that it would be best on the back of the piece somehow.

I have finally started working on the green wire on the red section of felt, starting with another spiral in one corner and then meandering around. It’s almost finished, but I ran out of thread to couch with, with only a couple of inches of the metal wire left to catch down. I need to look for a matching thread in good daylight. The wire catches the light beautifully and sparkles like beads.

Stitching with the wire was what I was procrastinating about, but once I got started again it wasn’t as difficult as I feared. I just had to be careful not to flick it around as I stitched and catch mine or anyone else’s eyes with it. It started off rather long, but I didn’t want to cut it!

The other piece I couldn’t remember what to do with was again from a workshop at Lincoln Guild with Marian Jackson. Unusually I hadn’t taken photos of her work to give me some ideas. Marion used sweet-wrappers on a dark felt background, layering the coloured silver papers, bits of organza and Angelina in an abstract way. I think we used Pritt stick or similar to hold them before stitching them down. I used running stitches in a Sylco to hold it down but, coming back to it, the Angelina especially was a bit flyaway. At the first meeting of Linconshire Textiles I spoke to Marian and asked her if she would send me a few photos for some ideas, which she kindly did.

I hadn’t remembered that some of her pieces had been machine stitched down. I found the perfect blue metallic thread that I had picked up in a “must have” bag at one of the stitching shows ages ago. There was no label of any kind on it, but it only broke once on the rows of straight stitch that I machined across the other way to the hand stitches, pretty good for a metallic and it has anchored everything down nicely.

It just needs some more beads and bling to finish it off, just the thing on a dull day or a dark night in front of the fire.