Have Your Say

Errors, Game Changers and Other Things

Last week, we wrote an article about bobbin lace to atone for our error in misidentifying a vintage sample sent in by one of our readers. Unfortunately, the mea culpa does not end there, as there was another error in All Stitched Up! issue #319 which our eagle eyed readers also picked up!

In the article about Christine P. Bishop’s project ‘Wedgewood’, we incorrectly spelt the name of the historic porcelain company with an additional ‘e’ to match the name of the project. In fact, the company name is Wedgwood, without the second ’e’. We’ve corrected it now but thank you again for all of the emails pointing out our mistake.

We have had to practice some humility over the past weeks, and we can only apologise that occasionally, errors do get through our editing process. We will do our very best in the future to catch them before they get sent out to the wider world!

Although much of our inbox was filled with our community kindly correcting us, we did also receive a number of other messages on various topics, from thimbles to threads, that we also wanted to share.

Samantha Bramich’s email was entitled ‘A game changer tool’, which immediately caught our attention. She was talking about the Clover Adjustable Ring Thimble. After years of suffering from a sore middle finger and improvising with old leather glove finger ends and every different kind of thimble you could imagine, Samantha finally discovered this clever tool.

It sits between the first and second knuckle on the middle finger, so it is nicely out of the way and keeps the finger ends blissfully free.

‘It patiently awaits the moment of need, while my sewing goes with a rhythmic flow which is a joy!’

If you have a game changer tool which you cannot stitch without, let us know what it is! We’d love to share it.

We are still receiving some great thoughts on thread substitutions.

Elizabeth Morris does much of her embroidery on quilt blocks. When she travels, rather than taking multiple skeins of thread with her, she chooses a variegated thread with the range of colours she wants within it. That way, she only has one skein to carry so it is less likely to get tangled or lost in transit and she can still enjoy the look of multiple colours in her work.

Alice Rathofer was inspired by Mendie Cannon’s suggestion to use a transparent red plastic sheet to view colour values. However, if you don’t have red plastic to hand, Alice’s idea was to place the threads on a photocopier and copy them in black and white instead. This offers you the same effect.

Alice is also an advocate of the ‘floss toss’, where you place the threads you plan to use together on the fabric. This allows you to see if any of the colours are going to be lost in the background or are jarring in contrast.

Ann Baseden shared with us the story of her workroom.

At the moment, it looks as if someone has opened the door, thrown things in, and then quickly shut the door again before it all fell out!

Ann has been working on mixed media pantomime costumes, so her poor workroom is filled to the brim with odd bits of plastic, paper, paint, beads and associated tools and equipment. Ann laments the fact she used to have a beautiful, purpose-built workshop in her previous house, but the reality is, this workroom is what she’s got. If only she could find the time to clear it out!

We really do love to hear from you, whether it is to relate your stitching experiences, tell us something wonderful that has happened in your stitching life, or just to share your knowledge and help us all learn something new. Keep writing in and keep the conversation going.