About

Mary Corbet

writer and founder

 

I learned to embroider when I was a kid, when everyone was really into cross stitch (remember the '80s?). Eventually, I migrated to surface embroidery, teaching myself with whatever I could get my hands on...read more

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The Big Fat Hairy No – Wrong Stitch!

 

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It’s inevitable.

At some point in your embroidery journey – maybe at many points, if you’re anything like me – you’re going to make less-than-ideal choices now and then when it comes to embroidery stitches.

Sometimes, stitches you’d think would work in certain circumstances end up being Just Plain Wrong.

You see, I’ve discovered that I’m not the most accurate visualizer. Some people have a real gift for accurately visualizing outcomes, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t really fit that category. Once I’ve latched on to an idea, I have to try the thing to see how it’s going to look.

So I tend to grasp at the first idea of a thing and think Oh! Hey! Yeah! That would be a great idea! … only to find, an hour or so down the road, after trial-and-error-and-error-and-error, that no, it really wasn’t a great idea.

Case in point:

Garden Swirl design - flower center filling
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Appliquéd Letters on Altar Cover – Finished

 

Welcome to Tuesday! And to a Very Quiet Week at Needle ‘n Thread.

Anna, you see, is gone for the week.

And while neither of us may be the Most Talkative People in the World while we are working, it’s strange to be working alone again, in silence. It’s funny, though – I’m making it through my daily to-do lists in record time, for some reason. I feel so accomplished!

Today, I thought I’d share the results of the appliquéd lettering project that I told you about a couple months back, and that I updated you on here. My deadline for that was the end of May, and I was able to deliver it on May 30th.

Appliqué letters on an altar cover
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Upcoming Stitch-Along: Garden Swirl for Summer

 

Happy Friday! Here’s a little project update for you!

We’re *almost* ready to launch our next Stitch Snippet stitch-along for Garden Swirl – a small embroidery project that we’re going to finish by mounting as a box lid.

Today, I’ll be finishing this final stitched sample that you can see below. I’ve had to stitch it – or parts of it – several times, to get the design just right and to work out the colors, which were eluding me for a while.

Before we go further, apologies for the photos. I have to rely on phone photos, because I’m working from home with dear old dad, and yes, I left the camera card at work. *Sigh* So much for thinking ahead…

Garden Swirl Stitch-Along Project
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Making the List: What Tutorial Would YOU Like?

 

Several times a year, I sit down with my trusty sidekick Anna, and we work on Lists.

I’m a firm believer in making lists, as long as they’re usable. I don’t like spending time making lists, only to find that they are pointless, out of date, or out of (realistic) touch with what we realistically need to be doing.

But I do like making lists that can help influence our next activities and that can shape where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.

To this end… I have a question for you.

What Tutorial would YOU like?
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Highlighting Satin Stitch

 

Following the arrival and distribution of Elisabetta Sforza’s new book on padded satin stitched monograms earlier this year, I’ve received lots of little questions here and there lately about satin stitch techniques.

Today seems like as good a day as any – especially because I’m pushing a deadline on another project! – to highlight a few previous articles that are jam-packed with tips on satin stitching.

Satin Stitch refresh - ABC of Padded Stitch by Elisabetta Sforza
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Welcome to Summer! What’s Your Summer Project?

 

Well, here at the studio in Kansas, summer has officially begun – with a crazy-cold and rainy weekend. I even had the heat on yesterday!

Not summer-summer, mind you, as in the season, which commences on the summer solstice some time around the third week of June. I mean the summer that (since my childhood, anyway) always seemed to kick off with Memorial Day weekend. That’s when school was officially out back in the day. I know it doesn’t happen that way anymore – school terms often extend well into June now – but when I was growing up so many eons ago, that blissful no-school season of summer was sandwiched with anticipated regularity between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Between those two holiday weekends, we enjoyed glorious days of kid-freedom. Blueberry picking in the woods is what I remember in summer. Strawberry picking in fields. Walking to the library, stopping at a small gas station called Richardson’s on MA-111 in Massachusetts, to buy penny candy on the way home, driving poor Mr. and Mrs. Richardson nuts while we labored over the grave selection of a dime’s worth (or a quarter, if we were rich!) of candy. (Sixlets, anyone?)

Life is not quite as simple now. Now, I have to figure out how things are going to progress against a series of deadline during these summer months, so that we accomplish everything we need to accomplish at Needle ‘n Thread.

But at the same time, I think it is important to have some R & R at some point during summer, and to go along with that, I usually have a project in mind.

Tea Pot & Cups ready to stitch towels
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Oh, These Deadlines! Applique Lettering Progress

 

Oh, golly! I love deadlines.

Here in the studio, we’ve been working on the appliqué lettering project that we talked about here.

I really want to thank the Collective Mind of Needle ‘n Thread – that’s all of you – for your input and advice on the appliqué process for these letters.

We’re applying letters to an altar cover (which is exactly what it sounds like – a cloth that covers the top of an altar in a church, in order to keep the linens on the altar clean.)

Remember this one, that was worked entirely in goldwork and silk, a few years back? We’re making another one, but not nearly as complex, and certainly without the mega-hours that we put into that one.

Our deadline on this one is next Thursday, May 29th. Uuuuuuh…. hmmm.

That’s less than a week, and although it’s not nearly as labor intensive as the first lettered altar cover we did, it is not not labor intensive. Hand stitching takes time, no matter how you slice it.

Cloth of Gold letters appliquéd on altar cover
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