Hello everyone

Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that the new year brings everything you hope for and deserve.  School holidays have come to an end and it is back to work – although I hesitate to call what I do “Work”.  Work is not work if you love it!  I had a lovely time over the Christmas period stitching and sewing and thinking up new ideas (between all the other normal things one does in ones life………….).

So what are my new years resolutions, besides the usual, eat less, do more exercise,  and all those other things that we generally dont stick too I have some much more exciting resolutions to share with you – you can shout at me at the end of the year if I fail to fulfill any of them!

1.  Progress.  A New Year calls for progress and that means new ideas or expanding on a theme, as Eisenhower once said “Unless we progress, we regress”.  So this year I will be i ntroducing a new range of kits and patterns – ideas on what to do with your finished embroidery.  I have spent months fiddling with different ideas and polishing up my rusty sewing skills and think I have come up with a range of accessories that are practical, useful and pretty.  Combining embroidery with a sewed item required much thought and research on different types of fabric, interfacings etc, it has opened a whole new world for me – but I will tell you more about the process in a later blog post.  These items are still in the designer stage, but am currently putting together instructions and sourcing materials so hopefully will have the first ones ready to launch by next month.

2.  Instruction.  Knowledge and instruction are vital if we are to develop our embroidery skills and with this in mind I plan to introduce a series of mini lectures on needle painting throughout the year.

3.  New Book.  The book I was working on in 2013, Miniature Needle Painting Embroidery (working title) is safely in the hands of the publishers in Australia and work starts on the edits next week.  It is due for release about June 2014 and I promise to tell you more about it soon.

The Etsy shop has re-opened  for business as usual, meantime, wherever you are be it winter, spring, summer or autumn have a wonderful week and many happy stitching hours.  Trish