Join Me! Creative Hand Stitching Journey

Hey, y’all! Happy New Year! It’s been a minute since I’ve shared anything – I’m back! We’re launching a new season of Creative Hand Stitching Journey, and I’m here to share the changes for 2023 with you.

Creative Hand Stitching Journey is my year long class with Gotham Quilts. I host a monthly virtual meeting, and we work our way through Sue Spargo’s excellent Creative Hand Stitching book. Last year was my first year teaching it (my first year taking embroidery seriously, too), and I learned so much! The decision to jump into embroidery feet first, by teaching a year long class seems wild in retrospect. For most of the year I was a month ahead of my students.

Changes for 2023

1. Project. Last year a lot of people seemed to want a project assignment. I gave a few suggestions, but I wasn’t ready to design anything. Over the year, I fell in love with stitch books, so I decided on a monthly sampler, to be assembled into a book at the end of the year. Students are free to work on anything they like, but if a stitch book intrigues you, there are monthly patterns for pages.
2. Demo Videos. Each stitch lesson has a demonstration video now, so it is more of an on-demand class. This made more sense to me than the live demos, where you would have to scroll back and find what you were looking for.
3. Morning and evening meetings. I’m adding another meeting session – We are now meeting virtually at 11 am and 7 pm on the second Wednesday of each month. I know I prefer to take daytime classes, and I hope that extra session will make scheduling easier. Attend either, both, or neither session. It’s up to you. Sessions will be recorded and posted, in case you want to be a creepy lurker (no judgement.)
4. Stitch order. I rearranged how we will be moving through the book. Last year I NEEDED to go in order, but the book just doesn’t flow well that way, so I shuffled everything into an order that makes more sense to me. I added a few basic stitches, too. Things like blanket stitch and satin stitch, which aren’t addressed in the book at all.

I’ll be putting a lot of my attention into this class. Eleven people have already signed up! I’ll be doing plenty of embroidery this year, and sharing it in the classroom. My goal is to build a community of enthusiastic embroiderers. We don’t have to get fancy (Spanish knotted feather stitch is not required), but we do need to have fun.

Embroidery is the main focus of this class. While Sue Spargo does a lot of work with wool, that is not what the book covers. I want us to master the stitches before we add another dimension of complication. There is a short section covering the basics of wool appliqué, and I will share the personal wool projects I am working on. I have more AccuQuilt embroidery projects coming up this year. If you thought those penguins were cute, hold on to your hat.

Community

Our community for Creative Hand Stitching Journey resides on the Gotham Quilts Mighty Networks site. We decided to step aside from Facebook for a multitude of reasons. We have a lot more control over our environment this way, and we like it. If you want to check out our Gotham Quilts community, click here. CHSJ is behind a paywall, but there are other quilting conversations happening, and everyone is very supportive.

Tempted? Check out the details on the Gotham Quilts website, or drop me a line. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.