World Embroidery Day - Follow up

I hope everyone had a great day on World Embroidery day and got the chance to stitch a little. Thank you to all those who commented. I did promise to write up about it, so here it is :)

As I had mentioned before, Annie Penin offered to teach us a bead embroidery design and about 15 of us met up at Societe Textile. Pretty much all the ladies knew each for years and years, having been taking classes with Annie when she used to teach at a shop. Many of the ladies are members of Les Brodeuses Quebecoises and we even had two coming in from Lévis.

 Annie had brought in her finished design which she had sewn into a pretty tote.

The fabric she used was one she found in France and is lovely. Any chance someone knows where I can find it?

The kit came with the design pre-drawn and all materials except for the sewing thread which I will buy tonight (hopefully).

We started off by sewing the outline of the branch with beads.

Once we had a good portion done, we could start couching down the tweed. This was very cool, I would have never thought of using fabric to simulate the texture of a tree branch. There will also be a mixture of spangles and bugles stitched on top of the tweed, but I haven't started doing that.

By the end of the day, we knew how to applique the organza for the leaves and cut around it. Annie used these very strange looking scissors do this that protects the fabric. Once I acquire a pair, I will share a picture. We also learned how to outline and stitch the flowers with the raffia, a very strange type of "thread" but it gives a really nice shine.

I'm looking forward to working on this again, but I can only work on it at a table since I need two hands, meaning this will be an indoors project. I don't know if I should be praying for rain or what :P

As these things happen, something accidentally ended up in my bag ;) These are two beaded flowers that Annie had designed. I think Annie will be feeding my bead addiction for a long time to come.

Not a lot of pictures were taken that day as we were all busy stitching (and talking) but I managed to find one on Annie's Facebook page. I'm at the back in pink with my head down studiously stitching.

I had a lot of fun talking to all the ladies. It was great to hear about their stitching experience. For example the ladies I was sitting with have all been tow Paris numerous times to attend the exposition Aiguille en Fête as well as take classes with Lesage.

Since it was so nice outside, I didn't want to stay inside.

In fact World Embroidery Day lasted the entire weekend for me. I took Fandango outside and stitched the whole day in the sun. I even managed to finish all the satin stitches! I've now moved on to the four sided stitch and there are a lot of them.

If anyone is interested in trying raffia, one of the ladies mentioned you can get some from the Container store.