First steps embroidery

Well, we had our first sewing class last weekend. When I did sewing in school back in the '70s, we sewed rows of stitches on rectangles of gingham, carefully using the boxes to mark out our stitch lengths and stapling the filled pieces into a little notebook that got thicker and thicker as time went on and more swatches of stitch samples were stapled into place. I still have mine somewhere (thanks, mum!).

This is a very good way of learning to do steady, controlled stitches.

But it's not the most interesting.

On my stitchery travels, I came across first blackwork and then redwork, and I thought that redwork would be a much more pleasant way to learn this. And I know I'm not the first, given that my reading brought me to many examples of redwork penny squares from the late 19th/early 20th century, with which children learned to sew, creating decorative pictures at the same time.

So that's what we did...kind of.

Everyone got some good fairly solid cloth that was easy to work with and wouldn't allow the workings on the back side to show through (I used curtain lining for this project), a long-eyed needle and an embroidery hoop and, after a little work with pen and paper to make sure they got the size and font right, they wrote their names on the cloth and got to work in the colour of their choice, backstitching carefully over the pencil line. (I went a bit further with my example piece and wrote an inspiring quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.

By the time everyone had 'written' their name in backstitch, it was on to decorating the space around it. This the kids are still working on, and they are still leaning towards backstitch, but I have hopes that they will explore a few more before we move on to the next part of the project.

And while I lean towards flowers, the kids started sewing clouds, vines, sunsets and the wavey sea around theirs. Naturally, I am going to steal their ideas for my own projects. :-)

Above is a combination of backstitch, stem stitch, lazy daisy, straight stitch, scroll stitch, chain stitch, couching and French knots.