I love craft books. In fact, I’m hooked on them (in addition to my little obsession with cookery books too…our house is pretty full!). I’m a big fan of Aimee Ray’s embroidery designs and have already blogged about some designs from her Doodle Stitching books. When I saw the pincushion on the front of Doodle Stitching: Embroidery and Beyond, I knew that I had to make it! So this weekend I finally got around to making it, and I’m so pleased with how it has turned out!

This is the first time that I’ve ever done stumpwork embroidery, and it was easier than I thought!

If you’d like to make your own, Aimee has written a tutorial on her blog to show you how!

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On Thursday I had lots of crafting planned (I’d been thinking carefully about it all week!) and was really looking forward to making the most of my part time days. But I woke up with the most horrible migraine and ended up staying in bed for the whole day! Needless to say, I didn’t get anything done – never mind any crafting! I do get migraines every now and again and I’ve been meaning to get around to making an eye mask to help when I get one. I really could have done with it on Thursday, but at least I’m prepared for the next one!

Aimee Ray has an embroidered eye mask in her book, Doodle Stitching, and I used the templates from that but designed my own pattern on the front. I have looked to see if the templates are available online but they don’t seem to be – but the book is worth investing in! If you don’t want to buy it, I found another template and tutorial from The Red Kitchen which is slightly different to this one but has really clear instructions.

I used some scraps of fabric left over from our wedding waistcoats to make the mask, so it was good to put some left over bits to good use! Once I’d finished the embroidery on the front of the eye mask, I was able to cut out the remaining pieces and sew it all together. The important thing to remember is to put the right sides together so that it’s the right way around when you turn it inside out!

I decided to use some elastic instead of ribbons (as suggested in the book), and had this gorgeous chevron elastic that I got from Etsy a while ago. I had to get a bit of pink on there somewhere!

A mask would be a really good gift and if you used some pretty patterned fabric instead of embroidering the front, they would be even quicker to make. Perfect for a relaxing night’s sleep!

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Doodle Stitching by Aimee Ray

I absolutely LOVE Aimee Ray’s Doodle Stitching books. Until a couple of years ago I hadn’t really sewn anything, let alone tried my hand at embroidery! But these books are so accessible and the designs are beautiful, and I’d highly recommend them to anyone whether you’re a beginner or a pro.

What is really helpful about these books is that Aimee talks you through the equipment you’ll need, different types of stitches and pretty much anything else that you’ll need to know to get started. I haven’t perfected all of the stitches yet, but the instructions are very clear and I’ve picked them up quite quickly.

The first design that I tried out was one of the tree designs from The Motif Collection (which is the second book of the two). I decided to use the ’tissue paper method’ for transferring the pattern because I wanted to make the embroidery as accurate as I could. The notes suggest that this method is most suitable for embroidering on fabrics such as felt (and I was just using cotton), but I think the experiment paid off. I mainly used split stitch for this design as it seems to be the one I can do the neatest, and the tree is quite intricate. Once I had stitched over the paper the next job was to remove the paper with tweezers. This was a little bit fiddly, but not too difficult to do if you’re using an embroidery hoop. And I’m so pleased with the result!

Work in progress using the tissue paper method (left) and the finished design (right)

The next design I made was one of the embellishments (also from The Motif Collection). The design is quite complicated and needed to be embroidered quite neatly, so I decided to use the tissue paper method again. Although I did manage to be neat (amazingly!), this design was much more difficult to sew using tissue paper because it tore so easily and I spent a lot of my time flattening the paper so that I could see where the design needed to be! I think that I might have to investigate other ways of tranferring the design onto the material if I’m sewing another complicated pattern like this one. But it is such a beautiful design – it will make a lovely piece of hoop art I think. I didn’t use the colours that Aimee suggests in the book (for either of the designs, actually) but that is the beauty of all of her Doodle Stitching designs – they would work in any colour palette.

Embellishment (No.163) work in progress (left) and the almost finished design (right) – I just need to remove the last few pieces of tissue paper!

The next embroidery project that I’ll be working on is to make waistcoats for our wedding, and I’m going to use some of Aimee’s designs as well as some of my own to make them a little more fancy. I’ve never made waistcoasts before but have bought quite a simple pattern, so fingers crossed they will look good! I’ll be posting photos of my work in progress so you can see how it is going…so stay tuned!

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