Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who read and either commented on my previous post or got in touch in other ways. I am very grateful to all those of you who has offered support, insights and practical information. Not only do I feel supported and vindicated in my stance, I also have ways forward, both for responding to the venue and also to start looking at the issue of where the line is between copying and inspiration. Thank you all.
Not surprisingly, I’ve not done much stitching this week and as my first market of the year at Alford is fast approaching, I thought I’d share some of the latest upcycled pieces that I’ve made for it. First is really a bit of a glow up. These were two commercial felt brooches which came in a bag of broken bits and pieces. The felt is really thick and they are glued together which has made some of the stitching interesting to say the least.
The leaf had been roughly cut off the red one so I removed the rest of it with a mixture of careful pulling and snipping. Then I added a perforated earring front with beads and stitching to the centre ball and attached five bracelet spacers with more beads to the petals. I decided to turn this one into a hair clip rather than a brooch so I added a circle of felt to the back to cover the glue marks and stitched a hair clip onto that. I’m not sure if less is more with this one. I’m still in two minds whether to add beaded blanket stitch to the edges of the petals.
I decided to keep the purple one as a brooch and added some sets of dangles from a single completely OTT earring to the petals and a bead cap to the centre. I think I’m going to put some embroidery to the leaf to mark the veins but again, I’m not sure whether a beaded blanket stitch edging would be too much?
Felt again for the third finish and this is a piece that has been on the go for four years! I started with one of these broken necklace sections:
And added one of my own wet felted beads in a lovely mixture of silk and merino which I halved to set in the spaces. At the time I wasn’t sure what I wanted, if anything, to add to the surface of the beads.
However, it was while I was auditioning bits to use for the flowers that I realised a scattering of little brass watch cogs with pearl bead centres to echo the faux pearls left in the necklace section would be perfect.
It’s been an interesting week, hence this post, which is a little different from my normal ramblings. I’ve talked before about how I respond to sources of inspiration; the fine line between being inspired by someone’s work and outright copying and I like to think that I’m always policing myself to ensure that if I’m inspired by someone else’s work I run with it until it becomes my own version. When I scroll through Instagram I increasingly see artists in a range of media trying desperately to reclaim their work or designs which have been copied and used without permission by AI or big companies. I certainly never dreamed it would happen to me, and worse, by someone I know.
I designed and created the Encrusted Seascapes workshop back in 2022 for In The Stitch Zone. My initial inspiration was from the Embroiderers’ Guild website which was a covered stone, I believe, encrusted with all sorts of raised embroidery stitches. I liked the idea of the stitches and as you have probably noticed by now, I love anything to do with the sea, so I took the encrustation idea and ran with it to produce my first sample. I also hit upon the idea of using scraps of organza fanning out from the central limpet ring to break up the blank fabric and give some initial prompts of where to stitch. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of that, but this distinctive combination of raised embroidery stitches, the organza scraps, and the limpet ring/shell at the heart of the image is my idea, my design and, I believe, that makes it my intellectual property.
It’s a lovely workshop. I’ve taught it in several places since and it always goes down very well. However I discovered last week that someone of my acquaintance who I taught at one of these workshops took it lock, stock and barrel, including the title, and taught it herself at a workshop venue in June, using the piece of work she stitched with me as the advertising image. As I wasn’t credited this suggested to me that she had led the venue to believe it was her own work/idea/workshop.
So I contacted her, pointing out that I wasn’t happy that she had taken my idea without asking and profited from it and that as far as I was concerned she was in breach of my intellectual copyright. She messaged me back, apologising profusely for what she described as her ‘mistake’ and said she didn’t realise she was doing anything wrong as there are “many examples of this sort of design on the internet.” Really? So I went off and did a Google picture search of the piece she stitched under my tutelage, which happens to be so similar to my samples that it was no surprise that the first pictures to come up were my own work which I’ve posted online. The other pictures Google came up with did certainly not have that distinctive look. (That’s another one of mine below…)
My reply was couched in somewhat stronger terms because I don’t consider teaching someone else’s workshop wholesale a ‘mistake’ and I wasn’t upset, I was furious that one of my most popular workshops has been stolen and she and the venue had earned money from this.
I also contacted the owner of the venue with the date stamped proof that the workshop was mine. She responded a couple of days later, pretty much dismissing my concerns, telling me that the tutor “shares our belief in the value of showing by example and felt that her own mixed media seascape, albeit created in your workshop, was another such inspirational piece. I am sure she never intended to ’steal’ your design but wanted to use her version to impart her love of embroidery and her skills to our students.”
This was certainly not the response I expected. Perhaps naively, I thought any reputable venue (and this one is well known in the North of England) would be horrified that a tutor had completely ripped off someone else’s work rather than doubling down and excusing her behaviour. They have said they will not teach it again but it’s left me reeling. Do we just have to accept that concepts and designs we have created as workshops or kits can be taken and taught by other people without us being credited and we have no come back? Do I need to look into copyrighting my work? Or is there any other way I can protect my work from being stolen? And that’s stolen without the inverted commas that the venue owner used to soften the reality of the word because as far as I’m concerned this is theft.
I loved creating those little seascapes and enabling other people to create their own but it’s going to be some while before I can look at them without feeling sick, angry and betrayed. Theft of your work by AI is bad enough, but for it to be done by someone you know and who moves in the same embroidery circles is disgusting.
I don’t think I’m alone when it comes to having an issue with finishing pieces. I’ve talked and thought about it a lot over the years and have come to the conclusion that the things that hold us back from putting the final stitches into a project are as complex as we are but often come from something like fear; whether that’s fear of it not turning our quite as we had hoped, fear of the way others might receive it or simply the fear of finishing it and it not being there to work on any more. And there certainly was a lot of fear holding me back from finishing the Persian Chandelier. Initially it was all about how on earth I was going to render the spiky shallow bowls that make up most of the form.
I used a tiny crochet hook to make little rounds which I liked but couldn’t quite work out how to attach them so they looked right. I experimented with back stitched spider’s webs which were effective for some of the spiky edged ‘bowls’ in the background but they weren’t three dimensional enough to use throughout.
I had been so pleased with the positioning of the glazing bars behind the chandelier that I really didn’t want to spoil them by adding a chandelier that didn’t quite hit the mark. After making it my February 2022 Move It On Project I had only got this far:
And there it sat for three years because I was too scared of not being able to get the effect I was desperate to achieve. As I said recently, I think it was also waiting for me to develop my three dimensional embroidery skills to the point I had the stitches in my stitch vocabulary that I could use to create the free-standing ‘bowls’. So last seen, I had got as far as here:
The mixture of blanket stitch cups and back stitched spider’s webs gave me the layered effect of the ‘bowls’ and the crocheted circles were the right size for the larger ones at the bottom. Now all I needed to do was to put in the twisty spirally bits and I decided drizzle stitch would be a good choice for those.
I think a lot of the twisted elements are actually yellow, but I suspect that they look green in the photo because of the blue background from the ‘bowls’ so I used some green/yellow variegated thread as well as some yellow and finally, six years after the initial visit, It’s done!
I have one piece left to stitch for this journal, which will be based on this photo to remind me of the scorchingly hot weather:
However, there are an awful lot of other things in front of it in the queue at the moment so it might be a while before the Kew memory journal is finally finished.
That is almost half way through the pieces for this year’s holiday journal, thanks to working smart last week and quickly completing the Seaham beach page for the final day.
I’ve finished the Northumberland landscape piece for the first day by adding the final stitches to the sky. I also dug out my Inktense and touched up the rows of stitching in the middle distance hills that I had worked with not quite the right coloured thread.
The Alnwick Alliums were finished a while ago, making three pieces out of the eight in total and I’ve moved on the Cragside Iron Bridge. Last seen I was making good headway with the close satin stitch over cord I was using for the delicate framework of the bridge.
That’s now finished and although there are some slight curves in the lines, I’m pleased with the effect.
I’ve started adding some of the fabric scraps around the edges to give the effect of the rhododendrons filling the valley it crosses. I’ve used French knots in scraps of thread to ruche up the fabrics to give the impression of thick, deep foliage (hopefully!) at the side and tiny invisible stitches in the chiffon at the bottom.
So my four finished/almost finished look like this:
It feels positive to have a bit of traction on these. I was concerned they seemed to be a lot further behind than I hoped when I got home from holiday and it’s good to be doing a little something for my own projects.
At the moment this is very much my motto. If I can stitch or create something new that furthers something else then I’m all for that and I managed it with last week’s In The Stitch Zone workshop for what I’m calling random blanket stitch. The idea was based on something I saw on Pinterest and liked the look of. The original started with a ring in the centre and was surrounded by concentric layers of blanket stitch of massively varying widths and heights. Each new stitch is worked into the top ‘bars’ of the previous layer and it grows organically as you have to decide what dimensions to make each stitch. I thoroughly enjoyed stitching my sample piece.
The way the stitches meet made me think of foam at the edge of waves on a beach so I wanted to stitch that idea during the session. But rather than creating a new fragment of work, I realised I already had one partly set up where this idea would be perfect: the Seaham beach piece from this year’s holiday journal. I had only got as far as choosing the pebble and beach fabrics.
So I attached the pebbles with the tiniest of stitches through the yellow silk onto a background layer of calico and started the random blanket stitch in the opposite corner to the pebbles.
This was one of those where on earth do I stop moments, but I hope I’ve chosen the right balance between too much exposed sand and not enough! I then added extra texture to the sand with some good old faithful lines of running stitch in an unusual rust-dyed cotton. I was having so much fun that I completely forgot to take any process photos until I picked it up this morning.
I’ve finished all the running stitch and added some of the bits of sea glass I beachcombed that day. They are all superglued first because just stitching on its own isn’t enough to hold them in place and then stitched down in various interweaving designs.
So not only do I have my work from the session exploring random blanket stitch further, I have the second completely finished piece for this year’s holiday journal.
On an old project – a piece from my 2019 Chihuly at Kew Memory Journal based on this stunning Persian chandelier.
The last time it had an airing was for the February 2022 Move It On project. I started to add backstitched spider’s webs for some of the chandelier sections but it got no further, partly because I felt that they weren’t going to be 3D enough but on the other hand the tiny crocheted circles I’d made would be too much. So this is where I left it.
I picked it up again this summer when I found the project pack it lives in at the back of a shelf, taking up space I wanted for something else and discovered that in the interim my creative subconscious had very kindly solved the 3D problem. I scattered a few more backstitched spider’s webs down the length of the chandelier and then started to fill in the spaces with some detached buttonhole needle lace flower-like shapes. They’re only attached at the centre and so fall over themselves just like the elements of the original.
I based them on the cup stitch I used in the recent under the sea raised embroidery with a base of three stitches in the middle arranged in the shape of a triangle.
Then, instead of working knots into each side of the triangle, I packed as many buttonhole stitches into each straight stitch as I could fit, working into each of the base stitches until I had a circle.
Then I carried on in a spiral, working more detached buttonhole stitches into the top of the ones on the previous round and where I could, adding two or three into each stitch so it flared out.
Once the shape was big enough I ran the thread down through the stitches on the outside to go back through the fabric at the bottom and then worked a French knot into the middle just to fill it up.
This is how far I’ve got. I’ve also added the two crocheted discs in at the bottom, one folded and the other gathered.
It’s a bit more solidly packed that the original but it has exactly that riot of texture and depth that I was looking for and I’ve also decided to use another of the stitches from the raised embroidery project for the swirls and spirals. It was obviously waiting for me to level up my embroidery skills in order to be able to make it work!
My middle one is currently volunteering at the Pen Museum in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter and earlier this year when the manager was wishing they knew someone who could make jewellery for their shop by upcycling some of the thousands and thousands of antique dead stock pen nibs they have in storage she was in the right place to say, “Well, actually, that’s exactly what my mum does…” They sent me a small selection to start off with and my first challenge was drilling holes in them. The steel is so hard I broke every one of my (admittedly cheap from eBay) ‘tungsten carbide’ drill bits, split two of the nibs and the friction burned tiny holes in the block of wood I was using to drill into.
I started again with some very expensive proper tungsten carbide drill bits from a reputable supplier and my Archimedes hand drill rather than my Dremel. The drill bits worked brilliantly but the nibs were so hard they still were literally shredding the bits into shorter and shorter stumps. In spite of losing piece after piece of the length of the bits, they somehow kept cutting and I was able to drill all the nibs.
I sorted them into pairs for earrings and decided that as well as reclaimed beads it would be fitting to add sections I cut from a vintage wooden ruler.
And cogs from a clock mechanism.
As I’d split a couple and there were some mismatched ones I had three odd ones left over so I decided to stitch them onto scraps of hand made felt to make brooches. I teamed this lovely Iridinoid nib with some nuno felt and watch cogs and gave it a beaded blanket stitch edging.
These nibs went really well with an adjustable swirly ring once I’d gently flattened it out. The silk swirls in the felt look like waves and it has a beaded blanket stitch edging with a fringe. I put everything onto the story cards I use for all my upcycled jewellery to tell the buyer what their new acquisition is made from and what the components originally were.
My middle one duly took them to the museum and I waited with bated breath… I’m delighted to say they were very well received and not only have I been given a lot more nibs to work with, I also had to deliver a second lot of earrings in time for their Open Heritage Day.
I’m going to need several more of those very expensive drill bits!
As I’ve said before it’s often so difficult to finish a piece of embroidery like this. I’m not a painter but I’m acquainted with enough people who are to know that the same is true of any piece of art and as stitchers we do need to remind ourselves repeatedly that what we embroider is art. And knowing where to stop, where the end point is of a piece that only exists rather imperfectly in your head, is an art in itself. Not only that, but you have the understanding in the back of your mind that you can go too far and potentially mess it up or even worse, not realise it’s isn’t right until it’s too late and it’s mounted or in some state where unpicking is going to be nigh on impossible. Perhaps that’s why so often I get almost to the end of a project and then it stalls. I suspect that the fear of finishing and not getting it ‘right’ (whatever that really is) can sometimes be stronger than the desire to complete your art.
Anyway, this week I ‘felt the fear and did it anyway’ with my Under the Sea raised embroidery and there were an awful lot of false finishes before I finally put down my needle and called it a day. Last seen I was moving the Yorkshire button around in the hope that I would be able to work out whether I was actually going to be able to make it fit and wondering at the same time what else needed to be added, if anything. As you can see, the Yorkshire button hasn’t made the cut for this piece of work – it’s just that bit too big and chunky.
Looking at photographs does help clarify what needs doing and I felt that there should be something more in the middle, especially to fill the gap between the top of the middle rock and the string padding coral. I wondered about using more of the short picots I’d already put in but after discussion I decided to go with some longer twisted picots to echo the ones on the right.
I’m really pleased that they not only filled the gap but also made sense of the space in the middle and helped link the vertical elements on the left with the ones on the right. I also added a few more French knots to the left hand side under the cup stitches, both to fill in the gaps and also to finish off the odds and ends of thread in my needle after stitching the picots.
So here is the finished piece. I think…!
As I’ve completed the odd buttons piece for In The Stitch Zone that I shared last week I’ve been working on embroidering decorative settings for individual buttons and with it being the main making part of the year for me I decided to work smart and turn some of them into jewellery.
These earrings are made from buttons stitched onto scraps of silk Japanese kimono fabric. The gold coloured ovals at the top are two ends of an odd vintage cuff link which I deconstructed and drilled. They give the whole drop the right sort of weight to hang nicely.
The first project I planned for the Autumn session of In The Stitch Zone was based around the idea of attaching buttons in different and interesting ways. I was intrigued by some images on Pinterest of single buttons not only stitched down in unusual ways, but also enhanced with concentric bands of stitching around the edges. Then of course the algorithm started showing me all sorts of different types of stitching featuring buttons and I was hooked.
For my sample piece I was inspired by a wintry looking button wreath with lots of spiky stitches like feather and fern stitch poking out from between the buttons. I also wanted to use some of the most disregarded and passed over buttons I’d inherited from the women in my family – the workwear buttons from work shirts and trousers, dungarees and jackets. The unprepossessing browns and uninteresting sludgy grey-greens with a few everyday mother of pearl shirt buttons for a bit of shimmer. Time for them to shine.
Once I’d gathered the buttons I wanted, I laid them out on my fabric – fittingly a piece from an old shirt I’d already cannibalised for the cuffs – and played about with the layout until it felt right. I didn’t want a wreath but I liked the idea of a swag with the larger buttons at the top cascading down to the smallest ones at the bottom. I took a photo for reference as my plan was to attach the buttons and embroidery around them as I went, rather than stitching all the buttons down at once. I didn’t have a particular reason for doing it this way, it just seemed right to me at the time.
Now for the fun part. I chose a limited selection of threads in similar colours, including some variegated dark greens just to lift it a little and started to stitch the buttons down. It very much was a make it up as you go along type of project as so many of mine are!
It was fun playing with various patterns of straight and detached chain stitches to attach the buttons and in keeping with my original inspiration I’ve continued with the spiky foliage-type stitches. Fly stitch, both in lines and circles around the buttons, a couple of variants of feather stitch, wheatear stitch (bottom left) and an experiment top right, which is feathered chain stitch (or chained feather stitch, if you prefer) which I’ve buttonholed along each edge of the loop to give these lovely open-centred leaves.
There are all sorts of other stitches in there for textures and variation too, including some woven feathered chain, chain stitch with added French knots, whipped back stitch, pistil stitch and detached chain stitches in various guises.
It’s all come together rather nicely and it certainly has allowed those unloved denizens of the bottom of the button box to take centre stage.
The last element for the Stitch Zone under the sea raised embroidery project was a Yorkshire Button. These are worked in the same way as a back stitched spiders’ web/back stitched wheel but over a cardboard disc.
When you get to the edge, you run your remaining thread through the loops on the edges and take the card out. You can then tighten it and stuff it to make a button – or in our case, a decorative element to add to the raised embroidery. My reason for having it as part of the design was that I thought it was rather like a sea urchin. However, now its done, I think it’s a bit big and rather overpowers the design. It’s not obvious from the photo but it does stick up a lot. Might have to rethink that.
One of the other people in the class made her Yorkshire button in green thread which reminded me of a barrel cactus. I looked at it and had one of those light bulb moments so when I got home I got straight into making my own green Yorkshire button. I used a medium weight perle and the corded texture has given it a nice shape.
Next step, find an old thimble and drill a hole for a jump ring.
Then take some brown fleece and needlefelt it into a rough cone shape to fit inside the thimble. I used the long tail from the Yorkshire button/barrel cactus to stitch it onto the top of the fleece.
I glued the fleece into the thimble to pot up my upcycled barrel cactus pendant.
Lastly I added a gold plated chain and it’s ready to wear. I was so pleased with the transition from the idea in my head to the finished item and it was a lot of fun to make.
If you’d like to take a look it’s in my Etsy shop here.
I'm a professional scavenger making a living selling curbside garbage. This blog details my finds and sales. It also acts as an archive for things beautiful and historic that would otherwise have been destroyed.
Under A Topaz Sky 
