Now I’ve got started on this I’m on a bit of a roll. It’s very satisfying to see each double page spread come together and the pile of finished pages gradually overtake the unfinished. There is, of course, a gap in the middle for the hedgerow embroidery, but the end is just about in sight.
The Japanese garden spread is a good illustration of how I have to plan my choice of stitches and threads several steps ahead because one side affects the other. I needed to minimise the blue and green threads I used on the other side of the left hand page so using pekinese stitch in the greeny-gold-peach thread helps cover them and hide the unwanted colours. I wanted to attach the koi stumpwork piece to the page with a thread that kept the autumnal colours going but the spread on the other side is the monochrome Bodmin Jail. However, I’d stitched the blackwork design on ecru aida rather than white so I found a pale golden brown that toned in with both sides and disappeared into the background after I whipped it with black stranded cotton.
The next spread is the hedgerow so I chose dark green instead of black to attach the blackwork and used the double pekinese stitch again because I really like the effect. I added some flowery elements to the feather stitch I used to attach the label to echo the yet-to-be-completed hedgerow embroidery that will hopefully soon be ready to go on the opposite page.
This was followed by the trapunto flower to represent the plaster ceiling at Lanhydrock. I didn’t want anything to detract from the cream on cream of the design so I stitched it down with tiny stab stitches in cream.
As the felt of the page is a heathered grey, the cream stitches weren’t very obvious on the other side either so I decided not to add any whipping or threading and just leave them as they are. It helps the very three-dimensional suckered tentacle on the other side to really dominate the spread.
Two more spreads to go – the label half of the next one is already done, so that’s one and a half really, plus the hedgerow, plus I suppose I really ought to stitch a page for the back with my names and date, plus binding the book. So probably a bit more than I first thought, but there is definitely a glimmer of light.
I’m still prevaricating about the last piece I have to finish stitching for this journal, but I decided that while I let my subconscious work on it, I might as well start putting the rest of it together.
The first job was to write out the labels for each page on either high count grey cotton or ordinary calico-style cotton using the ordinary fine liner pen I used for the 2023 journal and which worked perfectly well. If I was going to embroider every single word I think I would very quickly lose the will to live. Now they are written and cut out, I’ve started stitching them on.
It sort of works backwards. I start by stitching the label on the reverse of the page so the stitching on the back ends up hidden underneath the embroidery on the previous page and then I stitch the embroidery onto the front of the page so the back of that stitching goes around the label (so it has to be neat) and I can then make a feature of it.
The left hand ‘page’ is the inside of the hard cover, which has been covered in an offcut of Japanese kimono silk and on the right I’ve simply stitched the title page down with a running stitch.
On the reverse is the first day’s label and facing it, the windblown tree from the B3314 that I actually started in 2021! It absolutely counts because we did drive past it again and I recognised it like an old friend! I made a feature of the running stitches from the back of the title page by whipping them with a fine tubular viscose ribbon to echo the green on the tree.
So on the reverse of the windblown tree is Monday’s label. Because I’d stitched the windblown tree on with very small stitches in similar colours to the background so as not to detract from the image, I had larger stitches on the back in two different colours. I decided to try and disguise that with a double-wrapped version of Pekinese stitch in a slightly variegated thick soft perle.
Wrapping twice has covered up the longer linking sections of the stitch and put the focus onto the coils of thread, so I’m very pleased with the way this has turned out. I’m even more pleased that I now have two completed pages I can turn. It’s starting to feel like a proper book!
I’ve never had any problems working on multiple projects at once – my brain just works that way – and although I didn’t intend to do any more on the 2025 journal while I finished the 2024 journal, the ideal opportunity has just presented itself. The current project at In The Stitch Zone is to create a long piece of embroidery which will be rolled around a spool, but it can take any form. This is to enable people to work at their own level on something that inspires them.
I created a couple of examples for inspiration.
I stitched the TS Eliot quote years ago when I was first experimenting with rust dyed fabrics but the other one is a much older friend. It was my slow stitched avocado long cloth which I began back in 2009…!
It was languishing in a box as although I’d finished the majority of the stitching, I had no idea what to do with it – until I realised if I cut it into three strips and joined them, it would make an interesting strip of embroidered texture which I could wind onto a spool. Cutting into it was terrifying but in the end I lost very little stitching, even on heavily embroidered areas and once I’d joined the strips and blanket stitched the edges, it was surprisingly stable.
Having stitched two samples I was a bit stuck for something to work on in the sessions until I came across some off cut strips of woollen blanket fabric. Thick, heavy, soft and they rolled beautifully. And I didn’t have a book prepared for my 2025 holiday journal. In fact I didn’t have any sort of format organised but what about stitching them onto one of the blanket strips and having a scroll format journal?
So this is the scroll format 2025 Northumberland holiday journal so far.
The title page is Quaker stitch and luckily one of the pages I’d already finished was the first day, so that has been stitched in place too. I’m going to back the blanket strip, so no worries about how to disguise the stitching because it will be hidden.
I’m so pleased I’ve managed to find something meaningful to stitch as my spools project and also move on the holiday journal. I’m looking forward to seeing how it progresses and how the various pages work with such a different format.
For the first time ever, we’ve been able to book our annual holiday outside of term time. Not only am I very grateful that we are able to go away, but also that it’s hundreds of pounds cheaper than it would have cost us in May half-term and it will be quieter. We’re returning to a cottage in North Cornwall which we stayed in two years ago and as I feel it would be a bit embarrassing to have two unfinished holiday journals from the same place, it’s given me a bit of an imperative to get my 2024 holiday diary completed.
Nobody will be surprised to hear that when I checked, there were only three days (out of eight) left to stitch and of those, one was nearly finished, one was about half way through and one was not started, so as usual, I’d dropped the ball with the end very much in sight. I decided to go for the easy win and start by finishing the one I’d nearly completed, which was the Trapunto quilting representing the wonderful Jacobean plaster ceiling in the Long Gallery at Lanhydrock. I had found trying to pack the tiny sections of the leaf with roving very frustrating but when I picked it up I discovered I only had the flower petals to do, which was a doddle in comparison and the whole thing has worked well despite my earlier misgivings.
The next one I tackled was for our visit to Newquay Aquarium where we met Athena the common octopus. I was interested in doing a close up view of one of her legs and had made notes about the colours and shading but got no further than this.
I’d had various ideas for how to create the suckers including appliqued felt and stitched buttonhole rings, but then inspiration struck and I gathered circles of hand dyed fabric over small plastic rings and then back stitched round the inside of the rings to stabilise them and give the effect of the edge of the suckers. Placed over the background tentacle shape in the same fabric, they worked even better than I had hoped. I attached them each with a single French knot, couched some thread down to finish off the edges and added texture to the back ground with lines of running stitch.
Two more completed and just the ‘easy’ walk that definitely wasn’t left to stitch. Last seen it looked like this as I was reluctantly trying to add realistic looking Ragged Robin, Herb Robert and Foxglove flowers.
Markets, Christmas and Scunthorpe Little Theatre Club’s 2026 panto Robin Hood and the Babes in the Wood are finally all put to bed and I’m able to breathe again and tentatively think about getting back to some proper stitching. It’s not that I haven’t been stitching, but it’s been sporadic and bitty, which makes it difficult to blog about.
As I directed the panto this year I didn’t costume it, but still ended up with a reasonable level of involvement as the head of the costume team was a novice and costuming panto is no easy task. I only made one piece of costume (my choice) which was Friar Tuck’s walkdown stole because I wanted it to reflect the story: oak leaves for Sherwood Forest and pizza for the plethora of food jokes he had to deliver, including the Hawaiian pizza he sadly burned because he should have cooked it at aloha temperature….
I decided to use felt applique on a calico background as the character was wearing a black habit. Using an image of a real oak leaf, I cut out eight in a variety of different sizes and shades of green before invisibly stitching them to the backing and adding back stitched veins.
The pizza slices were made in a similar way but I invisibly stitched all the layers together first before adding the back stitch once it was in place on the stole. It makes them beautifully tactile.
Even four oak leaves and a slice of pizza per side was a lot of hours of stitching, so I left the rest of the stole plain and went looking for some green fabric to back it. I thought I had found the perfect piece – until I reviewed it by natural light the next morning, only to find it was more like turquoise…
But since there had been a fair amount of joining and messing about, I decided that as it was the back, and he was only wearing it for the walkdown – all of five minutes tops – that it would do.
Unfortunately this is the last photo I took, which shows it almost finished. Having tried it on the actor, we decided it needed to be made narrower on both sides and have little fringed trim along the bottom just to finish it off. Then I forgot to document these last minute finishing touches in the whirl of managing a complex show, which has been pretty much the story of my life for the last six weeks!
I don’t have any plans to direct again soon – and certainly not two shows in one year as I did in 2025, but there is no rest for the wicked and I’m already back at work editing my first ever panto script which I wrote back in 2017 – Sleeping Beauty, which will be our panto for 2027. But hopefully there will be time for stitching…
Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who read and either commented on my previous post or got in touch in other ways. I am very grateful to all those of you who has offered support, insights and practical information. Not only do I feel supported and vindicated in my stance, I also have ways forward, both for responding to the venue and also to start looking at the issue of where the line is between copying and inspiration. Thank you all.
Not surprisingly, I’ve not done much stitching this week and as my first market of the year at Alford is fast approaching, I thought I’d share some of the latest upcycled pieces that I’ve made for it. First is really a bit of a glow up. These were two commercial felt brooches which came in a bag of broken bits and pieces. The felt is really thick and they are glued together which has made some of the stitching interesting to say the least.
The leaf had been roughly cut off the red one so I removed the rest of it with a mixture of careful pulling and snipping. Then I added a perforated earring front with beads and stitching to the centre ball and attached five bracelet spacers with more beads to the petals. I decided to turn this one into a hair clip rather than a brooch so I added a circle of felt to the back to cover the glue marks and stitched a hair clip onto that. I’m not sure if less is more with this one. I’m still in two minds whether to add beaded blanket stitch to the edges of the petals.
I decided to keep the purple one as a brooch and added some sets of dangles from a single completely OTT earring to the petals and a bead cap to the centre. I think I’m going to put some embroidery to the leaf to mark the veins but again, I’m not sure whether a beaded blanket stitch edging would be too much?
Felt again for the third finish and this is a piece that has been on the go for four years! I started with one of these broken necklace sections:
And added one of my own wet felted beads in a lovely mixture of silk and merino which I halved to set in the spaces. At the time I wasn’t sure what I wanted, if anything, to add to the surface of the beads.
However, it was while I was auditioning bits to use for the flowers that I realised a scattering of little brass watch cogs with pearl bead centres to echo the faux pearls left in the necklace section would be perfect.
It’s been an interesting week, hence this post, which is a little different from my normal ramblings. I’ve talked before about how I respond to sources of inspiration; the fine line between being inspired by someone’s work and outright copying and I like to think that I’m always policing myself to ensure that if I’m inspired by someone else’s work I run with it until it becomes my own version. When I scroll through Instagram I increasingly see artists in a range of media trying desperately to reclaim their work or designs which have been copied and used without permission by AI or big companies. I certainly never dreamed it would happen to me, and worse, by someone I know.
I designed and created the Encrusted Seascapes workshop back in 2022 for In The Stitch Zone. My initial inspiration was from the Embroiderers’ Guild website which was a covered stone, I believe, encrusted with all sorts of raised embroidery stitches. I liked the idea of the stitches and as you have probably noticed by now, I love anything to do with the sea, so I took the encrustation idea and ran with it to produce my first sample. I also hit upon the idea of using scraps of organza fanning out from the central limpet ring to break up the blank fabric and give some initial prompts of where to stitch. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of that, but this distinctive combination of raised embroidery stitches, the organza scraps, and the limpet ring/shell at the heart of the image is my idea, my design and, I believe, that makes it my intellectual property.
It’s a lovely workshop. I’ve taught it in several places since and it always goes down very well. However I discovered last week that someone of my acquaintance who I taught at one of these workshops took it lock, stock and barrel, including the title, and taught it herself at a workshop venue in June, using the piece of work she stitched with me as the advertising image. As I wasn’t credited this suggested to me that she had led the venue to believe it was her own work/idea/workshop.
So I contacted her, pointing out that I wasn’t happy that she had taken my idea without asking and profited from it and that as far as I was concerned she was in breach of my intellectual copyright. She messaged me back, apologising profusely for what she described as her ‘mistake’ and said she didn’t realise she was doing anything wrong as there are “many examples of this sort of design on the internet.” Really? So I went off and did a Google picture search of the piece she stitched under my tutelage, which happens to be so similar to my samples that it was no surprise that the first pictures to come up were my own work which I’ve posted online. The other pictures Google came up with did certainly not have that distinctive look. (That’s another one of mine below…)
My reply was couched in somewhat stronger terms because I don’t consider teaching someone else’s workshop wholesale a ‘mistake’ and I wasn’t upset, I was furious that one of my most popular workshops has been stolen and she and the venue had earned money from this.
I also contacted the owner of the venue with the date stamped proof that the workshop was mine. She responded a couple of days later, pretty much dismissing my concerns, telling me that the tutor “shares our belief in the value of showing by example and felt that her own mixed media seascape, albeit created in your workshop, was another such inspirational piece. I am sure she never intended to ’steal’ your design but wanted to use her version to impart her love of embroidery and her skills to our students.”
This was certainly not the response I expected. Perhaps naively, I thought any reputable venue (and this one is well known in the North of England) would be horrified that a tutor had completely ripped off someone else’s work rather than doubling down and excusing her behaviour. They have said they will not teach it again but it’s left me reeling. Do we just have to accept that concepts and designs we have created as workshops or kits can be taken and taught by other people without us being credited and we have no come back? Do I need to look into copyrighting my work? Or is there any other way I can protect my work from being stolen? And that’s stolen without the inverted commas that the venue owner used to soften the reality of the word because as far as I’m concerned this is theft.
I loved creating those little seascapes and enabling other people to create their own but it’s going to be some while before I can look at them without feeling sick, angry and betrayed. Theft of your work by AI is bad enough, but for it to be done by someone you know and who moves in the same embroidery circles is disgusting.
I don’t think I’m alone when it comes to having an issue with finishing pieces. I’ve talked and thought about it a lot over the years and have come to the conclusion that the things that hold us back from putting the final stitches into a project are as complex as we are but often come from something like fear; whether that’s fear of it not turning our quite as we had hoped, fear of the way others might receive it or simply the fear of finishing it and it not being there to work on any more. And there certainly was a lot of fear holding me back from finishing the Persian Chandelier. Initially it was all about how on earth I was going to render the spiky shallow bowls that make up most of the form.
I used a tiny crochet hook to make little rounds which I liked but couldn’t quite work out how to attach them so they looked right. I experimented with back stitched spider’s webs which were effective for some of the spiky edged ‘bowls’ in the background but they weren’t three dimensional enough to use throughout.
I had been so pleased with the positioning of the glazing bars behind the chandelier that I really didn’t want to spoil them by adding a chandelier that didn’t quite hit the mark. After making it my February 2022 Move It On Project I had only got this far:
And there it sat for three years because I was too scared of not being able to get the effect I was desperate to achieve. As I said recently, I think it was also waiting for me to develop my three dimensional embroidery skills to the point I had the stitches in my stitch vocabulary that I could use to create the free-standing ‘bowls’. So last seen, I had got as far as here:
The mixture of blanket stitch cups and back stitched spider’s webs gave me the layered effect of the ‘bowls’ and the crocheted circles were the right size for the larger ones at the bottom. Now all I needed to do was to put in the twisty spirally bits and I decided drizzle stitch would be a good choice for those.
I think a lot of the twisted elements are actually yellow, but I suspect that they look green in the photo because of the blue background from the ‘bowls’ so I used some green/yellow variegated thread as well as some yellow and finally, six years after the initial visit, It’s done!
I have one piece left to stitch for this journal, which will be based on this photo to remind me of the scorchingly hot weather:
However, there are an awful lot of other things in front of it in the queue at the moment so it might be a while before the Kew memory journal is finally finished.
That is almost half way through the pieces for this year’s holiday journal, thanks to working smart last week and quickly completing the Seaham beach page for the final day.
I’ve finished the Northumberland landscape piece for the first day by adding the final stitches to the sky. I also dug out my Inktense and touched up the rows of stitching in the middle distance hills that I had worked with not quite the right coloured thread.
The Alnwick Alliums were finished a while ago, making three pieces out of the eight in total and I’ve moved on the Cragside Iron Bridge. Last seen I was making good headway with the close satin stitch over cord I was using for the delicate framework of the bridge.
That’s now finished and although there are some slight curves in the lines, I’m pleased with the effect.
I’ve started adding some of the fabric scraps around the edges to give the effect of the rhododendrons filling the valley it crosses. I’ve used French knots in scraps of thread to ruche up the fabrics to give the impression of thick, deep foliage (hopefully!) at the side and tiny invisible stitches in the chiffon at the bottom.
So my four finished/almost finished look like this:
It feels positive to have a bit of traction on these. I was concerned they seemed to be a lot further behind than I hoped when I got home from holiday and it’s good to be doing a little something for my own projects.
At the moment this is very much my motto. If I can stitch or create something new that furthers something else then I’m all for that and I managed it with last week’s In The Stitch Zone workshop for what I’m calling random blanket stitch. The idea was based on something I saw on Pinterest and liked the look of. The original started with a ring in the centre and was surrounded by concentric layers of blanket stitch of massively varying widths and heights. Each new stitch is worked into the top ‘bars’ of the previous layer and it grows organically as you have to decide what dimensions to make each stitch. I thoroughly enjoyed stitching my sample piece.
The way the stitches meet made me think of foam at the edge of waves on a beach so I wanted to stitch that idea during the session. But rather than creating a new fragment of work, I realised I already had one partly set up where this idea would be perfect: the Seaham beach piece from this year’s holiday journal. I had only got as far as choosing the pebble and beach fabrics.
So I attached the pebbles with the tiniest of stitches through the yellow silk onto a background layer of calico and started the random blanket stitch in the opposite corner to the pebbles.
This was one of those where on earth do I stop moments, but I hope I’ve chosen the right balance between too much exposed sand and not enough! I then added extra texture to the sand with some good old faithful lines of running stitch in an unusual rust-dyed cotton. I was having so much fun that I completely forgot to take any process photos until I picked it up this morning.
I’ve finished all the running stitch and added some of the bits of sea glass I beachcombed that day. They are all superglued first because just stitching on its own isn’t enough to hold them in place and then stitched down in various interweaving designs.
So not only do I have my work from the session exploring random blanket stitch further, I have the second completely finished piece for this year’s holiday journal.
I'm a professional scavenger making a living selling curbside garbage. This blog details my finds and sales. It also acts as an archive for things beautiful and historic that would otherwise have been destroyed.
Under A Topaz Sky 