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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Nesting Place – Needlebook Finishes!

 

Amazon Books

Last month, the final Nesting Place online class finished up here on Needle ‘n Thread. It was a great class! My heartfelt thanks goes out to Bobbi Chase, who offered me the use of her design for the class, to Lamora Haider and her crew at Access Commodities, who were so helpful in putting together the fine supplies we used in the Nesting Place project, and to all the participants who made it a successful and fun class!

Now, you just have to let me do the Teacher Brag thing a bit here. If we were in school, I’d be pinning up these class projects on the bulletin board and lining the school hallway with them! Needle ‘n Thread will be my bulletin board and my hallway today!

Though you might be tempted to think that all the needlebooks from the same class project would come out exactly the same, you’ll see here that this isn’t the case at all! Embroidery sometimes reminds me of handwriting – you can always tell that someone else has done this stitching or that stitching. And of course, when it comes to embroidery projects, there’s always that option of personalization! I hope you’ll enjoy seeing these darling needlebooks, the outcome of six grueling weeks of torturous embroidery!!

Nesting Place - Hand Embroidered Needlebook
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Stitch Play: Inside-Out Buttonhole Wheel Flowers

 

You can never have too many options for stitching hand embroidered flowers! Today’s embroidered flower-looking-thing doesn’t necessarily have to be a flower – you can work it on curves or lines as well. But worked in the round like this, it makes an airy, light flower that’s a lot of fun.

So, for today’s Stitch Play, we’re going to stitch an Inside-Out Buttonhole Wheel Flower. You can work through the whole process shown here, or you can stop at different stages for the effect you want. This is the complete element that I’ll show you today:

Hand Embroidery Stitch: Buttonhole Wheel Flower
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Monogrammed Whitework – An Exquisite Piece of Needlework!

 

I love whitework embroidery. I love monograms. I love drawn thread embroidery. I love linen! I love vintage linens! And I really love it when whitework and monograms and drawn thread are combined on one vintage embroidered linen! That’s what I call a winning combination! And oh, what a piece of embroidery this is!

Come gaze with me!

Monogrammed Whitework Hand Embroidery - Vintage Linen
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Medallion: Goldwork Galore!

 

The only embroidery left on the Medallion project is goldwork embroidery… and lots of it!

I really appreciate all the incredible input from you on the last article regarding adding the pink ring around the design, joining the roses – thank you so much for your take on it, whether positive or negative. You all gave me a lot to think about, and I really appreciated all your comments. I’ll be answering some of them when time allows.

Ummm…. I did decide to keep the pink. It isn’t Pink-Pink, by the way (if “Pink-Pink” is allowable as a classification of Pinkness!). I would call it more of a “light red” or true “rose” color – not Candy Pink.

This is more or less my current state of progress:

Goldwork & Silk Embroidery: Church Embroidery
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Stitch Play: Casalguidi Stitch – or Really Raised Stem Stitch!

 

Casalguidi is an embroidery technique, rather than just a stitch. It consists of very heavy raised stem stitch worked in curves, lines, squiggles, or what-have-you (whatever the design dictates), usually with a lighter background of pulled thread stitching. Casalguidi is usually a whitework embroidery technique, but the technique can be easily adapted to your surface embroidery, wherever you want a high-relief, textured line that tends to be somewhat heavy. It can be easily incorporated into stumpwork embroidery projects, too.

For today’s Stitch Play, as a follow-up to yesterday’s raised stem stitch, we’re going to look at Casalguidi, and hopefully, you’ll find lots of potential for this technique, at the various stages in the stitching. This is what we’re going to create:

Casalguidi Stitch in Hand Embroidery
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Stitch Play: Raised Stem Stitch

 

Raised stem stitch is a great way to create thick, textured ribbons, bands, ropes, tree trunks, caterpillars… lots of possibilities with this technique!

There are different ways to go about raised stem stitch – you can really raise it by working it over a cord or rope padding (as is done in Casalguidi embroidery), or you can raise it moderately by working long lines of horizontal stitches, over which you can then work the vertical stitches you’ll see in the tutorial below, and then the stem stitch over those. Or, you can just barely raise it a bit, by working the vertical stitches right on the fabric, as we’ll do here.

In today’s Stitch Play, this is what we are going to create:

Raised Stem Stitch
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Stitching Dilemma: Think Pink

 

Last week, I mentioned running into a stitching wall on the Medallion Project. There’s something rather deflating about getting some hundreds of hours into a goldwork and silk embroidery project – fiddly hours, you know! – and running into a wall. Something seriously deflating.

I attacked that wall in innumerable quick sequences, without photographing each one. I was engrossed, engaged… perhaps a wee bit enraged… and the camera was the last thing on my mind! I did catch the second-to-the-last attempt to scale the wall – the last attempt being the one that catapulted me over it. I’ll tell you about it and show you what I did. You can let me know if you agree, disagree, feel sick when you see it, or what!

Church Embroidery: Silk & Gold Marian Medallion
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