Ever since creating those masterpieces (ahem) at Aneela's embroidery class at the Fat Quarterly Retreat I've been dying to find the time to do a bit more embroidery.
Incidentally, the Cosmo floss we were generously donated at retreat is brilliant. Beautiful colour saturation and incredibly easy to separate into strands. The Eternal Maker has a huge range of Cosmo colours.
I've been pinning embroidery like crazy on my Pinterest Embroidery board (incidentally, after a cold spell I'm right back onto Pinterest. I'd forgotten how addictive it is You can find all my boards here), and checking out patterns on Etsy.
I have always loved samplers (antique dealer for a mother = lots of vintage samplers and other embroidery kicking around the house), but these modern versions are seriously inspiring me...
Original embroidery sampler by Drop Cloth (Rebecca, owner and designer at Drop Cloth also has a lovely blog).
Yellow sampler by Miriamjoy on Flickr.
There are also, naturally, tons of smaller-project alternatives that I rather fancy (because it's just possible that I don't actually have time to tackle a huge sampler right at this very moment):
Leave it to Martha Stewart to make twee cross stitch family portraits socially acceptable.
Aneela's fabulous London-centric pattern.
Of course, the Japanese, as always, manage to make it just a bit cooler, smaller scale, and more interesting (is there any craft where they don't do this?). See the books here, here, here and indeed, here. I also found some amazing modern Chinese embroidery books.
It's worth mentioning that I have precisely no time at all to be taking up embroidery right now - I have finally written a list of all my WIPs (expect it next week, along with deep gloom on my part about how long it's going to take to clear them), and I am banning myself from starting any time-consuming projects (and I think we can safely include embroidery in there) before they're all finished.
But as soon as I get a moment, I think it's safe to say I won't be short of ideas...
