Exploring Embroidery and Appliqué Workshop

Appliqué and Embroidery experiments

I had a lovely day at The Hut on Saturday running an Embroidery and Appliqué workshop. Although there were only a few participants there was still a good atmosphere and as the numbers were low I was able to give each participant more of my time and attention and even do a bit of stitching myself.

Some of my samples

All set up and ready to stitch!

As I wasn't sure how much experience the participants would have I kept my planning for the workshop quite open so that I could easily adapt to what people wanted. I took a wide selection of samples for people to look at and asked if there was anything people particularly wanted to try. Reverse appliqué was a popular choice so that ended up being the main focus of the workshop.

Choosing, sorting, selecting, arranging

Exploring different options

I like my workshops to be relaxed, enjoyable and above all give people the chance to be creative so I encouraged everyone to experiment and try things out. Luckily the group were very open to trying new things and were really positive about giving things a go. As always I enjoyed seeing how each person came up with something so different even though we all had the same materials and starting point.

The first cut

Suffolk puffs

Stitch experiments

By the end of the day each of the participants had a lovely piece of work that although not necessarily complete was well on the way and everyone had tried something different. As I often do after sessions like this I felt tired but happy and full of ideas and enthusiasm for my subject.

Flower experiemnts

Suffolk puff detail

Reverse appliqué detail

Reverse Appliqué and embroidery piece

Reverse appliqué, appliqué and embroidery

Detail

One of the things that I've taken from this session from a professional point of view is that it would possibly be good to offer more specific workshops; appliqué is such a huge subject area that it could be easily broken down further allowing people chance to develop more specialised skills. For example, one session could focus on reverse appliqué and another on shadow appliqué. And as for embroidery you could spend moths or even years on just one stitch!

My sample piece