Looking Back on Old Embroidery Pieces

It's very easy to get hyper-focused on whatever project(s) I'm working on at the moment. And sometimes I forget to look back at older, finished works and really appreciate them. So today, I'm taking a quick moment to recall two of my favorites, both completed around six or seven years ago.

The first piece is a small doily that I embroidered using a simple vine and flowers design of my own making back when I was still teaching myself surface embroidery stitches. Then I trimmed it in a circle of my bobbin lace:

I submitted this to the state fair in Utah (where I was living at the time) and actually won a blue ribbon (more for the lace than the embroidery, I suspect). There is some puckering on the embroidered part because I knew nothing about keeping fabric super taut at the time. But it was one of my first surface embroidery pieces and I'm still rather fond and proud of it. It sits on my nightstand in my bedroom.

I then decided to make a table runner to match using a very similar design, just on a much larger scale:

This sits on top of one of my dressers in my bedroom. Alas, the lighting isn't great in that part of my room, so this is not the best photo, but hopefully you can still see the embroidery reasonably well. Each of the four vines starts with a heavily padded satin stitch, like the doily, but a bit better.

I've had many compliments on that particular feature, and what's quite funny is that it was entirely by accident, both on the doily and the table runner. I was just learning satin stitch at the time and I couldn't get it looking quite as satiny as I wanted. (In hindsight, I was using too many strands of floss — one or two is best, and I only do two with a laying tool.) So I just kept going over and over it to make it look right. It ended up very padded and very lovely, particularly on this runner because my skill had improved a little by then.

The moral of this story is that even mistakes can turn out beautifully. And when you're learning something new, sometimes you just have to do whatever you can to make it look like you want it to. I don't believe there's only one right way to do any type of embroidery. There may be tricks and tips that will make it easier, and I always recommend trying to learn those. But if you don't know the tips or tricks, don't let that stop you. Do what works for you!