Putting mum's embroidery to use

I have finally finished both of these project bags where I’ve used some hand embroidery sewn by my mum. It’s taken a while to finish the larger of the two, and for no other reason than I’d not got around to it. When I was helping mum to relocate her sewing room she found some embroideries that she’d completed most likely in the 1990s as part of a magazine series, which she no longer wanted. Some went to the charity shop, and I brought a couple home with me always intending to adapt them into a project bag, and that’s what I did.

Delving into my stash I found the perfect fabrics to use. The smaller of the two (which is still approximately A4 size) makes use of some tiny bobble trim I felt particularly drawn to and some pink fabric which I think also came from mum. The lining is tiny rosebuds, and that was definitely from one of her old dresses - the turquoise paisley material is one I’d bought a while back and it just felt right to use for this.

The larger orange and purple one, which just about fits into one of the cubby holes in my Kallax unit, uses more from my stash. The orange and lilac wave fabric came as part of a set - and I’m not sure if you can see it but the text on the wave says ‘a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor’ and while mum’s not a sailor, I’m sure it’s something she’d agree with. Bizarrely the material reminds me of a dress she once had, but in actual fact it’s nothing like the actual dress - I remember the dress having swirls, though I suspect they were more likely paisley shapes, and the dress was a pale blue/lilac, so I’ve no idea why this material prompted that memory!!

They’ve turned out brilliantly and I’ve adapted my usual go to pouch pattern, and although they are larger and don’t have a vinyl front they use the same principle and construction with a tweak or two along the way, but the pouch is just a small part of it, mum’s embroidery is so much more.

Aren’t they great? And isn’t the embroidery just fab?

A pink and orange embroidered pouch

Last week I shared how I added to my swirls and completed my pink and orange embroidery, and today I’m sharing the completed pouch which I first set about quilting.

I wanted to use a decorative stitch on my machine and I’d found some variegated thread which looked a good match. It didn’t work out quite how I expected, but it wasn’t a disaster - and well to be honest, I wasn’t unpicking that first line. I’d tried it out on a test piece before I started so I knew how it looked.

I wanted to quilt this small piece using a variety of styles and so I continued with that plan, and I’m much happier with how it turned out once the narrow straight lines were added, especially once I decided to add these in the mid-section too.

So with my quilted embroidery, it was time for the pouch. As ever I had a plan in my head - and thankfully that worked out.

Onto the pouch!

It will be a long thin pouch, which is idea for its intended use - and this may sound like overkill, but it’s for my round hairbrush when we travel. Currently I use a plastic bag to avoid the bristles catching on any of my clothes, but I knew I could improve on that. I hadn’t always set out on that being its purpose, but the colours I chose also swayed me. It’s been a while since I’ve had orange and pink highlights in the front section of my hair (underneath not right on show) and so to me it made perfect sense to use for my hairbrush, in a nod to my previously more colourful hair.

How I wish I still had those colours, but I’m not up to dyeing my hair myself and my hairdresser here doesn’t do red dyes, let alone pinks - I tried another hairdresser and it didn’t work out, as she did what she wanted to do rather than what I wanted, and I hated it. So I’m not going there for a while yet anyway!

I cut my lining fabric larger than the embroidered piece and hoped that I could use that as a binding; clipping it into place showed me that it would work.

So that’s what I did. I intentionally put a curved corner on the left hand side to echo the motif, and left the right hand side squarer. The lining works well with all of the embroidery despite it not having any, or much, orange in it. It’s one of those ‘Spread the Word’ fat quarters that I fell for last October.

I thought I’d add poppers, but I didn’t like how they looked. I considered the older style metal press fasteners but they weren’t really what I was after either.

Then inspiration struck, in the form of my crochet hook case, and I knew that ribbons would be the way forward - but which one?

I think both the pink and the orange ribbons were from our wedding back in 2007, and so were of course at the bottom of my ribbon jar. And while either worked, I surprised myself and opted for what I thought would be my second choice - the pink.

Yeap, I’m happy with that. In fact I’m more than happy with how it worked out - and I’m even more happy to have something a bit fancier than a plastic bag to protect my clothes from my hair brushes’ bristles!

Adding to my swirls

This Indian Block Printed piece has had quite an evolution; it was first printed back in 2024 at the adult learning course I took in Newark. Back then this is what it looked like, and it had plenty of potential.

But with other projects on the go (many in fact) but especially my other Indian block printing embroidery ones, like the three leaves, the birthday bunting, the embroidered heart and the mandala for my popper pouch, this one got put to one side.

Until we headed off on our walking trip to the Gargano Peninsular. That’s what I love about embroidery - it fits into a small pouch, doesn’t need a lot of equipment and importantly when travelling pretty much stays the same size so you don’t need to find extra room in your case.

By the end of that just a bit longer than a week, it looked like this.

And that’s how it stayed for quite a while, though my plan was always to complete the second set of swirls in a bolder colour way. I thought I’d use each panel separately, but the more I worked on it the more I thought it could become one piece.

I’m not sure when exactly I picked it up again - that remains unphotographed and undocumented - but it was some time during 2025. I suspect it was my embroidery project for our trip to the US and Canada last spring, but I could be making that up entirely, though I find it hard to believe that I didn’t take any embroidery with me at all.

But the swirls were embroidered and looking good. Though for me to use them together as a single piece I wanted more, and hatched a plan to use my Indian printing blocks to zhuzh it up and fill in some of that white space.

Indian block printing at home

It was the first time I’d done any block printing since that course, and I was unsure how it’d work out - spoiler, it worked out fine and was just as much fun as I remembered. The spur for me to get my act together was to print my ‘sheep in Christmas jumpers’ Christmas cards, but I think dedicating a block of time (no pun intended) to printing works well

At an earlier stash sale I’d picked up a length of the spotty oilcloth to use as a worktop protector. I’d actually forgotten I’d had such foresight until I re-discovered it in my craft room reorganisation a month or so before, which was good as I’d been tempted to buy some more, but thankfully hadn’t.

Through trial and error I found that the setup above worked for me, this included:

• the spotty oilcloth to protect my kitchen island worktop

• a foam rubber mat to use as my main work area (tip: you don’t need to buy often more pricey blocking mats specifically for crafts, the children’s toy area mats work just as well and are often cheaper)

• My paints in use in front of me, using the plastic lids of instant coffee tubes and ice creams to hold the small dobs of paint and a cut up scourer to apply the paint to the block (both the lids and the scourers can be washed and reused many times).

And so I was off, but of course I needed to avoid printing over my already embroidered areas - so I tore a scrap of paper and lightly taped it over my embroidery before printing.

The mask worked well and my once plainer piece was just what I had in mind.

Though as I was embroidering I realised in some places I’d been over cautious, and so I drew the lines I wanted in place.

My plan was to start with pale pinks, graduating through hotter pinks and into the oranges below the double layered swirl.

I could have used variegated thread, but I didn’t. Instead I pulled a selection of lilacs, pinks, oranges and yellows and cut the embroidery floss to the same length choosing either two threads the same, or similar to use for that section as I went.

Other than that I had no real plan, and I’m super pleased with how it turned out.

It’s already looking different to that last photo, but I’ll save how it turned out - and in a surprise to no one, it’s a pouch - for another post.