Like some women collect shoes or jewellery or like some men collect fishing rods and footy souvenirs, I like collecting machine embroidered or better still hand embroidered linen.

Always trying to find a use for this beautiful work.  It somehow feels like I am honouring the embroiderer and all their hand work doesn’t go to waste.

 

Bunting, pincushions, pockets on dresses, brooches, panels in a quilt or part of a cushion cover, a decoration on a small draw string bag, a coffee stained embroidered napkin trimmed and the saved embroidered piece used as an inside pocket on a hand made  bag, all part of our handmade home.

The large embroidered table cloths can be space saving instead of cabinet doors and a good budget alternative, covering shelving, hiding those ugly computer chords or plumbing, easy to wash and change over giving a different look to the room.

Our fabric stash cupboard is on an internal wall, we chose to use an embroidered table cloth as a curtain to hide the contents instead of having cupboard doors on it, the curtain allows more ventilation stopping the fabrics from becoming damp or smelling stale.

 

The how to make the pincushions article I have written in the December 2018/January 2019 edition of Grass Roots Magazine, uses pieces of embroidery and scraps of linen or 100% cotton left over from other projects.

Jude x