When I heard a couple months ago that The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace would be hosting an exhibit by the Royal Collection Trust titled In Fine Style: The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion this summer (May – October, 2013), I knew I’d have to get my hands on the exhibit catalog.

So I did!

There’s something about needlework accessories… something that compels us to buy them, use them, enjoy them.

When I first started embroidering as a kid, accessories were never part of the package. I didn’t even have real scissors at first. I remember biting my thread to cut it!

But as an adult, I’ve found that needlework accessories and specialty tools are part and parcel of my whole love affair with embroidery. However, I’m not prone to “collecting” them just for the sake of having them. They have to be useful. And if they’re attractive to boot – well, that’s just the best type of accessory, in my mind!

Today, I’d like to show you a new accessory on the market – one that I believe is useful, unique, and attractive. I love these little needle tins!

While we look at them, we’ll chat with Lamora Haidar of Access Commodities, who conceived the idea for the needle tins and had them made for distribution. We’ll learn a little bit about the whole needlework accessory market, how ideas come about and progress to a finished product, and glean a little insight to this love of accessories to which many embroiderers are prone.

Shadow Work is a type of embroidery worked on semi-sheer or sheer fabric, with the bulk of the embroidery on the back of the design so that the color of the thread – or rather, a shadow of the color – shows through on the front of the fabric between two solid-colored outlines.

The stitch used in shadow work embroidery is essentially backstitch, but it is worked between two lines, alternating back and forth between the two lines with each stitch.

On the back of the fabric, the resulting closely worked herringbone stitch forms a layer of criss-crossing threads that shows through on the front of the fabric with just a hint of color between the backstitch outlines.

Last week, I had the opportunity to show someone how to do shadow work. This is the sample I worked up for the occasion.

Today, I’m happy to announce the winner of the book, ‘Twixt Art and Nature: English Embroidery from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580 – 1700 from last week’s give-away.

The give-away was generously offered by the folks at Hedgehog Handworks – they still have a small number of this out-of-print-but-highly-coveted book in stock. To my knowledge, the only other place you can find it for purchase now is through used book outlets, where some of the prices listed for it are shocking.

Finally! The Fan Flower Monogram Alphabet is Finished! You can find all the letters for this alphabet – perfect for embroidered decorative initials and monograms – available on this Monograms for Hand Embroidery page, as well as indexed under the Patterns for Hand Embroidery page.

The “rush” to get these finished lately (did I say rush? I think I’ve been putting them on Needle ‘n Thread since 2009!) is that I’ve been working with my collection of old publications, sorting them and organizing them. This means I’m digging up some treasures that need scanning and cleaning up. But no point in starting another collection with this one still hanging over my head, eh?!

So here’s the rest of the Fan Flower alphabet – letters X, Y, and Z – with the printable PDFs down below.