I guess my first embroidered collage was an example I made for my Textile Art students earlier this school year. To introduce them to simple appliqué and embroidery, I planned t have them make small collages from fabric and stitch them together using Sashiko patterns. I made this little arrangement; it’s about A5 size, I used glue stick to paste the collage together and then stitched using DMC embroidery threads.

Then later in the year, I went to the Knit + Stitch Show in London. In an effort not to be on my phone for the whole journey, I brought a little pouch with some thread and bits of fabric. It was meditative to slowly stitch while the world went by, listening to music and seeing where the thread would take me. What started as a few simple running stitches, turned into a complex net of layered blanket stitched I now title “Cast Your Net Wide”.

Now, months later, I’m still making Embroidery Collages. I’m obsessed.

I keep finding new paths for the threads to follow, new colours, new textures beneath the stitches.

Once they’re done, I attach them to a piece of unbleached cotton and whip stitch them to secure them. I haven’t done this for all of them yet, but once done, they look really finished and quite lovely if I do say so myself!

I have also started experimenting with using more definable imagery, such as this horse below. This means a more deliberate approach from the start. Here I created some suggestion of a landscape with the curved pieces of cotton and cord and the floral pieces in between. The horse looked so happy and it reminded me of the Body Groove saying, “We don’t walk, we strut!”

Now that I have a bit of a collection, I’m wondering how to display these. Shall I frame them, or perhaps add some firm backing so I can hang it with a string. I’ll have to experiment a bit. Any ideas are very welcome!