In the Beginning: Discovering Hand Embroidery

I stumbled onto hand embroidery quite by accident. I was embroidering little things on my crochet dolls, bears and faeries. As I searched for help to figure out embroidery stitches, I frequently went to Needle N Thread, a great tutorial website. I found myself searching around Mary Corbet’s website and really enjoyed all the tutorial videos that she posts there on embroidery. To solely focus on hand embroidery was certainly NOT something I was thinking about at the time of adding embellishments to any of my dolls, bears or faeries.

I blame it all on the bookstore.

I was with my husband for a short air conditioned retreat into our nearby Border’s books and voila! An Inspirations magazine! It featured a cute little embroidered bear on the cover. I simply showed it to my cute, also Artist, husband and said…”I’m really not interested in embroidery, I just think the bear is cute. I might just do that one project.” He said, “Sure, whatever you want.” (He says that a lot… 😉 )

And…the rest is history!

I picked, not the bear that lured me in, but, a quilt block from the Inspirations magazine. It was the first embroidery project EVER for me to try out. I just LOVE it!

While excitedly embarking on this challenge, I continuously went back to Mary Corbet’s Needle N Thread website to learn new stitches as they came up in the magazine design. Mary has made my journey into Embroidery Obsession easy and enjoyable. It is because of her that I found embroidery so ‘doable’ and enjoyable.

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