The hardest thing about leaving my studio by far was having to paint over my Studio Dariolina mural that was the main feature of the workshop room. Designed by my wonderful friend and partner-in-craft, Daria, it is something that means so much to us. We were absolutely heartbroken to be honest! But at the same time, we know that the design will STILL continue to mean so much to us. It’s a symbol of our friendship, how we’ve worked together creatively and everything that we will do in the future too It’s not the end, just a new beginning!

You can read more about the process of leaving my old studio here, but in this post I want to document some of the wonderful photos that I took of the time we painted the mural.

The design stage

When I first asked Daria if she would design a mural for the workshop room in my studio, her initial reaction was that I must be crazy! She had never painted a mural before, and wasn’t sure if she felt confident in giving it a go. But I knew that if there was to be a mural, it had to be a Studio Dariolina mural! I was thrilled when she said that she would have a go at putting some ideas down on (digital) paper.

We decided pretty early on that the phrase ‘take time out to be creative’ should be included. It’s something that’s really important to us, as I wrote about in my first book Colourful Fun Embroidery, and it just felt right for it to be part of the design. After a few emails and conversations in person, she sent me the first draft and I was in love! We decided on a couple of tweaks and then it was ready to go.

Painting my Studio Dariolina mural

We began painting on 11th October 2021, and I think it’s fair to say that we were the most nervous about actually transferring the design onto the wall. Armed with a laptop and borrowed projector (thanks, Keith!) we got our pencils out and went for it. Having anticipated that this would be the most difficult part, we were actually pleasantly surprised at how quickly we transferred it.

Once the design was on the wall (and we’d had a cuppa, obviously), we started painting. It was so fun to match the colours, and painting was hard work but really fun. Lots of bits needed a really steady hand, and having never done this before we realised that this was another challenge! Our dear friend Louise also joined us to paint some of it too, and we had a brilliant few days. That time shared together creating this wonderful artwork is something that I’ll never forget.

Seeing the mural in the space just made it complete, and it was a real talking point when people came to the shop. The light in the room was amazing, and the mural really set it all off. It was an inspiring place to be, and I’m grateful for all the time that I had there.

All good things come to an end

When it came to moving out, the mural (very sadly) had to go. A few people have asked why I didn’t leave it there, and the answer to that is that I had to paint over it before moving out for two main reasons. Firstly, I didn’t want to leave the artwork there for future tenants to adapt, and Daria agreed that we didn’t want it to be altered in any way. Secondly, I knew the next tenant would probably redecorate too, and if I had left it underneath I think I would have felt so incredibly sad knowing it was still there. Passing by it to get to the shops would have been hard for me I think. It felt right to paint over it together, just as we had when we first painted it.

The Studio Dariolina mural lives on!

A few weeks before I closed the shop, I had the idea to stitch a fabric version of it. I had the design printed onto some fabric so it’s about 1m wide, and I’m absolutely thrilled with it! It took me about a year to finally start stitching it, mainly due to needing to processing it all really. But now I’m finally stitching it, it feels right and I’m so pleased.

This will be a long-term project for me, something that’s a personal project for me to work around everything else that’s going on. Here are a few photos so far! You can follow along with my stitching on Instagram and Facebook too, as I’ll be posting photos there when I’ve made more progress.

I just wanted to say a huge thank you to Daria for creating this mural for me. Although things didn’t work out as I’d hoped with my studio and shop, we always have this to treasure and I’m so grateful for your time and your love that you put into this. The design will live on and is still a symbol of so much for us, and I’m so thankful for you!

The post My Studio Dariolina mural appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.

So today I’m really excited to tell you more about the recent big commission I was working on. It was this Top 50 Stitches booklet with Love Embroidery magazine, and it’s free with Issue 16 in July!

It’s SO hard not being able to share things when you’re working on a commission, especially when it’s this exciting! This free booklet contains so much embroidery goodness. And if you’re joining in with The Happy Stitch Project then you’ll definitely want to pick up a copy! It includes step-by-step photos and instructions to be able to stitch the Top 50 stitches, and if that wasn’t enough there are 3 mini rainbow-themed projects for you to stitch too. Yay! This booklet is sponsored by Anchor thread, and they kindly sent me the thread to be able to stitch this. It’s stitched in an 8″ hoop, and I’ve painted this in one of my favourite shades called ‘Alfie’. You can find the painted hoops here in my haberdashery.

Subscribe to Love Embroidery magazine today!

Subscribe to Love Embroidery by 29^th June to receive my exclusive Top 50 Stitches booklet! Master the art of modern embroidery with this essential 64-page guide, including rainbow-inspired projects, step-by-step tutorials, expert tips, templates and more. This is ONLY available with issue 16 of Love Embroidery magazine, so sign up here today to get yours! By clicking on this link you will receive 6 issues for £9.99 which is a bargain (UK only) I can’t wait for you to read it! I’ll add more to this post once the issue is out in the world.

The post Top 50 Stitches with Love Embroidery appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.

After three weeks of stitching this hoop together, this week I’ll show you how to stitch a star stitch in The Happy Stitch Project so we can finish this lovely, motivational hoop!  I have really enjoyed stitching this piece, and I don’t know about you but I have found it has been lovely to keep coming back to it over the past few weeks. There’s something so nice about being able to put it down and pick it up again – it’s one of my favourite things about hand embroidery. It’s something I talk about a bit in my book, but I feel like my love for this aspect of embroidery has grown even more this month.

Last week (which was week 8) we learnt how to stitch a stem stitch. It has been brilliant seeing you try it out over on Instagram, and I’m so pleased that the loopy technique helped! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to watch the tutorial on YouTube. I have definitely got better with practice! Thanks so much for sharing all of your photos – it really does make me so happy to see you enjoying the creative process during these difficult times.

How to stitch a star stitch

Watch the tutorial here:

In the tutorial, you’ll notice that star stitch is kind of two stitches in one! By making the horizontal and vertical lines, you can stitch a stitch that’s known as the St George Cross (which makes complete sense!). We aren’t learning this as a separate stitch in the project, but I thought it was worth mentioning in car you fancy using it at some point.

Watch me add star stitch to the Do Your Thing hoop here:

As you can see, I’ve used white thread on the white fabric to create the star stitch here. I have wanted to try this on something for ages, but as my projects are usually full of colour, I haven’t got around to it before now! I really love the effect of it – it is subtle but the stars still stand out. It was the final colour from the perfect pastels thread pack which I used for the rest of the project, so it was good to make sure it wasn’t left out. I really want to experiment with this more so I’m sure it will pop up in a future design.

Happy stitching!

I’m really looking forward to seeing you try out this stitch this week – don’t forget to tag me @hellohoorayblog on Instagram. And do let me know if you have any questions along the way.

Have you seen the first kit to accompany The Happy Stitch Project?

The Brighter Days Are Coming kit is the perfect way to put all your new stitches into practice! This kit gives you the right combination of freedom and guidance to create your own piece. Use the tutorial videos to help you to stitch your own design

You may also love…

My best-selling Keep Going kit is a lovely kit to work on over time:

https://hellohooray.com/product/keep-going-hand-embroidery-kit/

Or try a slightly smaller version with this design from my book, Colourful Fun Embroidery:

https://hellohooray.com/product/one-step-at-a-time-embroidery-kit/

If you need a thread conversion chart, I’ve got you covered:

DMC to Anchor thread conversion chart

The post How to stitch a star stitch appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.

I picked these words for this week because I’ve been hearing lots of small business friends saying that they’re suffering with the dreaded comparison at the moment. But it’s not just people who run a small business; anyone can feel it, and life in lockdown is making this more difficult. I think because everything is online at the moment, it’s easy to only present the best bits on social media. It’s something I talked about this week in this blog post. So this hoop is designed to be a little reminder to us all to keep doing our own thing. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing; we’re all on our own journey and doing what works for us. Just keep doing you!

Do Your Thing embroidered hoop: materials list

17cm (7″) embroidery hoop

A piece of white cotton or linen fabric, measuring 25 x 25cm (10 x 10″)

Templates (click to download)

A permanent method of design transfer, such as a Sublime Stitching pen and hand embroidery transfer paper

DMC shades from perfect pastels thread pack – next week we’ll also use shade 03 to stitch around the edges of the letters

Needle

Some embroidery scissors

Watch the Do Your Thing embroidered hoop tutorial video

Watch the arrowhead stitch tutorial here first if you want to practice first.

Step 1

Trace the templates (see the materials list for the link to download) onto the fabric using your chosen method. If you’re using a heat pen and transfer paper, check out my tutorial video here. Place your fabric in your hoop.

Step 2

Thread your needle with 3 strands of the first colour of thread. Starting at the bottom of the letter ‘D’, stitch arrowhead stitches moving upwards and around in the direction of the letter. Think about the direction as though you were writing it and follow that! Make sure you don’t stitch over the lines around the edges, as we’ll be adding stem stitches around the edges next week.

Step 3

Repeat with the remaining letters, until all of them are filled in. And that’s it for this week! If you don’t want to add stem stitch, you could always stitch a back stitch around the edges instead this week

You may also like…

See my hand stitched social media icons!

Hand embroidered social media icons

See one of my first ever embroidered banners here:

Embroidered banner

Make some simple decorations for your home with these fabric covered letters:

Fabric covered letters

The post Do your thing embroidered hoop appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.

I am so excited to be sharing this post today. Introducing Colourful Fun Embroidery – my first book!  Colourful Fun Embroidery features 24 modern projects to bring joy and happiness to your life. I am hugely passionate about getting creative to improve mental health and well-being. My book focuses on how you can use hand embroidery to help you take time out to be creative in order to feel good. Mindfulness is something that many people are focussing on more now, especially in terms of how crafting can help you feel better. When I started writing my book back in 2018, I couldn’t have predicted how relevant this would be right now in 2020. But it feels like the right time for it to be released into the world!

My book will be released on 30th October 2020 by White Owl Books, and it’s the perfect book for complete beginners and more experienced embroiderers. So today I thought I’d write a post introducing Colourful Fun Embroidery to tell you a little bit more about it and share some photos of some projects from the book. You can pre-order your copy here, and there will be links to this at the end of the post too!

Introducing Colourful Fun Embroidery: book description 

Take time out to be creative and de-stress with these colourful, fun embroidery projects from Hello! Hooray! Ranging from things you could complete in an afternoon to others that you can take your time over, enjoy every step of the making process as you focus on feeling good through being creative. The finished makes will bring colour and joy to your home, workspace and wardrobe.

The projects in this book allow you to craft your creative time by selecting makes according to timescale. Choose one of the ‘crafternoon makes’ if you want that sense of joy at finishing something, a ‘medium makes’ project for the days where you have a little more time for crafting, or for something to really take your time over you could stitch one of the longer ‘pick me up’ projects.

Each project includes step-by-step instructions, beautiful photos and inspirational ideas for how to make each project your own. So take time to be creative with this colourful, feel-good craft book!

Take time out to be creative

If I had to sum up the main theme of the book very briefly, it would be that my book focusses on the idea of taking time out to be creative. Over the last few years, I really struggled with work-related mental health issues. One of the things that really helped me to get through the day at the day job was to do some hand embroidery on my lunch break. I would take whatever I was working on and sit with a cup of tea and stitch. Even if it was just for 10 minutes, it made a huge difference. It slowed me down, allowed me to focus on something that I loved and I could always see progress even during a short time. For that short period of time I felt less stressed and much happier. Lots of my colleagues said how much they enjoyed watching me stitch too!

One of the main things that I love about hand embroidery is that you can fit it into little pockets of time here and there. I first got into it after our daughter (known as Little One here on my blog) was born in 2016. It was naturally a very busy time, but I felt a huge urge to do something creative. Hand embroidery was the perfect craft for me at this point. Being able to stop and start stitching without having to count stitches to work out where to continue was brilliant! Counting and measuring have never been my strongest skills anyway, and hand embroidery gave me much more freedom than other forms of stitching. I could pick it up for a little while when she napped, drop it mid stitch and then pick it up later. Even if later wasn’t for another couple of weeks!

When I started writing my book Little One was two, and whilst writing I fell pregnant with our second. They are now aged four and one and I feel more passionate about having creative time than ever before! Being creative makes my soul happy and I can’t imagine not doing something creative each day. It’s important to me individually but also to us as a family (see our creative family manifesto). Finding little pockets of time to be creative is super important for me. I’m not saying it’s always easy to do, because it isn’t! But by prioritising it, you can give yourself some time each day to focus on doing something that makes you feel good.

Introducing Colourful Fun Embroidery: the projects

I divided the sections of my book into three, based on the amount of time that it takes to complete each project. So there are ‘Crafternoons’, ‘Medium Makes’ and ‘Pick Me Up’ projects. This was really important to me, and was one of the first decisions I made when writing my book pitch back in 2018. I really wanted readers to feel like they could dip into my book, and pick the perfect project for them to start working on based on how much time they had. 

Sometimes you really just want to sit down and make something in an afternoon. You don’t want a project that’s going to take loads of prep before you can get started. Neither do you want it to drag on for ages! So the Crafternoon projects are perfect for this. You could get together with a friend for tea, cake and stitching (once we’re allowed to do that safely in person – or just do it virtually!).

Other times you want to spend a bit longer on a project. You might be going away for a few days, or just fancy doing some stitching at the end of each day. My Medium Makes projects are things that take a little more time to make than the projects in Crafternoons, but they can easily be finished in a few days. But the beauty of these projects is that you can take more time over them if you wish! There’s no rush, just enjoy the process – it is just as important as the thing you’re making.

My Pick Me Up projects take much longer, and that’s ok. Sometimes it’s nice to have something to keep working on, because you see it come together over time. You put so much love into it, and you’re really proud of it when it’s done. Some of these projects are heirloom pieces, and I hope that you love stitching them.

Make it your own

Another big thing that I wanted to emphasise with the projects in Colourful Fun Embroidery is that you can take them, play around and adapt them to make something else if you wish. When it comes to creativity, the best thing we can do to encourage it is to play around with it. Play with colour, pattern, technique, style – whatever. Don’t worry about getting things ‘right’, just go for it! I really want my book to be a source of creative inspiration for you, and I hope that it encourages you to be creative in your approach! You might look at one of the projects and like the design, but not want to display it in a hoop, for example. That’s absolutely ok! Take what you like and adapt it to suit you (please remember that the projects are for personal use only though!).

To make this a little easier and give you a starting point, each project comes with suggestions for how to make it your own. It might be that you take an element of one design and turn it into a different project altogether. Or you might take a colour palette from one, and use that for another project. This is wonderful! I can’t wait to see the results, so please share with me on Instagram @hellohoorayblog or via Facebook or Twitter.

Colourful Fun Embroidery: FAQs

I’ve had a few questions about my book already, and thought it would be good to end with a little FAQ section. I’ll be adding to these every now and again when I can.

Will I enjoy this book if I’m a beginner?

Yes! It doesn’t matter if you have never stitched before, so don’t worry if you’re a beginner. There are handy stitch guides as well as lots of information about getting started with hand embroidery. So don’t be afraid to give it a go! And don’t be afraid to make mistakes – it’s how we learn. My book will give you lots of ideas in terms of exploring your creativity and experimenting, and that’s all part of the fun! 

Does that mean it’s not a book for experienced stitchers?

Not at all! Lots of the people who have reviewed my book before release have said that they aren’t beginners but that they found it really inspiring. As I explained earlier in the post, I wanted to make the designs adaptable so you can use the project ideas as a starting point and customise it from there. I’m sure that experienced stitchers will feel inspired by my book too!

Is this book suitable for children?

Although several of the pre-release reviews have stated that the book is suitable for children (maybe because of the fun designs and bright colours?!), it wasn’t designed with children in mind. Of course, you can stitch the projects with children if you supervise your child, but some of the projects would be very tricky with children. Little One loves playing with thread and fabric, but I personally won’t be teaching her for a while! 

Will I need loads of different materials?

You can start hand embroidery with just a few basics. In my book I share a materials list, as well as a list of some of my favourite suppliers. I will also be stocking some of these things in the Haberdashery section on my website.

Will you be selling kits?

Yes! Some of the projects will be available as kits, and these will only be available through my website. Preorder book and kit bundles include the Good Vibes hoop, the Snail Mail hoop and the Long Player hoop – click here to order. Other projects will be available after release.

If you enjoyed reading this post, preorder your copy of Colourful Fun Embroidery today!

Preorders will be posted out once the book has been released – the release date is 30th October 2020. 

If you have any comments or questions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you!

The post Introducing Colourful Fun Embroidery! appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.

It has been a week since my new look website launch, and I can’t believe how that time has flown! I had intended to write this blog post a little sooner to coincide with the launch, but life happens and it kept getting pushed back. I’m in full-on market prep mode for our Etsy Made Local events here in Newcastle, but it has been in the back of my mind that I wanted to at least say hello again before then. So, hello! I’m back – yay!

I really hope that you love my new site as much as I do. I have to say that I’ve had some wonderful feedback about it over the last 7 days, so thanks to everyone who got in touch via social media! It has been a labour of love as I’ve been building it myself since the end of September. I’m not going to lie, fitting it around family life has been a bit tricky at times. But Tom has been amazing as ever, and we worked out days where I could have decent chunks of time to work on it. This has actually been a gamechanger to be honest, and we now try and work it out each week. I find that it’s a great way to avoid procrastination and I can approach the week much more positively when I know that there will be time to work on my business.

Crafty Commerce

I basically have no coding experience whatsoever, except for the odd occasion when I’ve managed to copy some code to sort out spacing (haha!). My friend Dan from Baltic Design (who has hosted my blog for years) and said he wanted to create a platform for creatives to build their website, and I have basically been testing this out for him. I am so thrilled with the results! It has all been done front-end and I have created something which is unique to me. I now have my own shop, where you can purchase my embroidered items, kits, workshops and more! My blog is much more appealing and I feel like I can actually share it with people again (it was a bit of a mess after I tried to change the theme – nightmare!). So yes, this platform is coming but it needs a bit more set-up before it’s widely available. If you’re interested, you can find out more about Crafty Commerce here.

In other news…

So there are a LOT of other things going on, some of which you’ll already know about if you follow me on Instagram. We are getting used to life with 2 children and our baby boy is just the sweetest. He is in love with his big sister, crawled at 6 months and his current favourite thing is waving. We can’t remember life without him now!

I also handed my notice in at the day job in September, so will be fully working on Hello! Hooray! from January! I am beyond excited about this – my book comes out next summer and it just felt like the right time to go for it. That and the fact that it has been making me feel like rubbish for longer than I should have let it. That’s all I’ll say about it for now – onwards and upwards!

These little rainbows are my current favourite make and they have been popular in the shop! Custom versions are available, and I’m working on getting more ready to ship hoops too. Once my markets are done at the end of the month, I’ll list any here so you can snap them up. I have too many ideas and not enough time right now, but I’m hoping to use some time in January to get some more things made.

I have embroidery workshops listed in my shop, and I’m delighted to be hosting some at For the Love of the North in the New Year. I’m a huge fan of Lucy and Paul and how they support North East creatives. They have just opened another shop at Spanish City in Whitley Bay, and we’ll be stitching there at my workshops. So excited!

YAY it’s good to be back!

Sign up to my newsletter (link in footer or sidebar) if you’d like to be kept up-to-date with more happenings, and find out first about new products and special offers. And look out for more blog posts coming soon…

Tell me what you’ve been up to – I’d love to know what you’ve been doing, seeing and making!

The post My new look website launch appeared first on Hello! Hooray!.