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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Stitching Dilemma: Think Pink

 

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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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Goldwork & Silk Medallion: On the Edge!

 

As mentioned earlier this week, I’ll be updating the Medallion Embroidery Project in larger chunks now, showing you progress on whole parts, rather than individual tiny elements. Why? Because from here on out, it gets a little repetitive! Don’t worry – I’ll still include close ups and those inevitable Instructional Moments (i.e. especially when I make mistakes, change my mind, run into trouble, and so forth!).

Today, I want to show you the edge of the Medallion all stitched in, so you can get a general idea of the whole look of the piece now.

Ecclesiastical Embroidery: Silk & Goldwork embroidery
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Goldwork Embroidery by Mary Brown – Book Give-Away!

 

Methinks today is a good day to give away a very nice goldwork embroidery book, called Goldwork Embroidery: Designs and Projects by Australian embroiderer, Mary Brown. You’re very welcome to ready my review of Goldwork Embroidery if you like. It was written in the days before my more in-depth approach to book reviews, but the essentials are there, and my opinion of the book hasn’t changed any!

Goldwork Embroidery by Mary Brown
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Stitch Play: Raised Spider Daisy

 

When I played with the detached chain stitch and the ribbed spider web stitch a couple weeks ago, to create the Chain Stitch Spider Daisy, a reader wrote and asked if there was a way to make the flower domed rather than flat.

So today, for Stitch Play, let’s look at the Raised Spider Daisy! Now, the concepts involved in creating this domed spider daisy are found in other raised stitches (for example, in raised satin stitch dots), so you can actually apply these concepts to creating all kinds of domed elements in your embroidery.

This is what we’re going to create in today’s Stitch Play:

Raised Spider Daisy Hand Embroidery Stitch
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Goldwork Dots: Lining them Up!

 

More goldwork dots today! But I think it’s the last time I’m going to show them to you.

You see, I’m musing about how much of the Medallion Project to show you these days. I don’t want to bore you to death with the slow progress!

And it is slow progress. All hand embroidery is slow progress, compared to what we’ve become used to with machines to do all our work. The slowness of it – the whole “journey” of any handwork project – is part of the appeal of handwork. Whipping out the Medallion on a machine wouldn’t be quite the same! And in fact, it couldn’t be the same. Many of the elements of this project can only be achieved by hand. And even those that could be achieved by machine wouldn’t look the same. So the progress is slow, and I can live with that.

But can you?!

Ecclesiastical embroidery: Goldwork on Silk Hand Embroidery
Continue reading “Goldwork Dots: Lining them Up!”