Mushroom, mushroom!

At the Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch show at the NEC in March 2012 I was fortunate to be able to go on a silk shading hand embroidery workshop with Katie Pirson, where we started this mushroom. I've now finished it, and taken photos of my process in finishing it as a hoopla too, for future reference.


It was really nice to be able to work on something with silk shading/long and short stitch, as it is a very useful stitch to have in my repertoire. Katie is a brilliant teacher; I agree with her that it should probably be called 'Long and even longer stitch'!


My finished mushrooms:





And here they are on my hoopla wall:





I finish my hoops with a layer of wadding behind the embroidery, which gives a really lovely raised appearance:





I also wrote up a tutorial for finishing hoopla hoops with a layer of wadding and a felt backing, like these, so that next time I don't have to try to remember what I did. it's in this Flickr slideshow, with directions in the captions:

Little Treasures with Christine Plummer

I also attended Christine Plummer's Little Treasures workshop, which was a fun session experimenting with lovely coloured papers and tags (painted with brusho), organza, buttons and machine stitching.

While I was aware that you could stitch on paper, I'd not experimented with the technique, and so it was good for getting ideas flowing. I also think I could modify this technique to use with my 7 and 5 year old nieces.

Silk Shaded Mushroom with Katie Pirson

Still having a marvellous time here at the Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch show. This afternoon I was lucky enough to be able to take part in a silk shading workshop with Katie Pirson, who I happen to know from my teenage years as a lighting techie, but hadn't seen since.

The workshop was excellent, and Katie is a brilliant teacher, very understanding and gives marvellous explanations.

We had a kit containing lovely linen with a mushroom design drawn on it, Madeira thread and very clear instructions. Katie took us through building up the layers in soft shading, with the very important point that your stitches need to be longer than you think, to allow for later rows of stitches to be fully incorporated.

I'm really looking forward to finishing my mushroom -thanks Katie!

(the picture of the finished mushroom is Katie's one -I'm not that good/speedy)