The embroidery course I signed up for as one of my habits and commitments started today. The theme of the course is “free-form embroidery”, i.e. embroidery without a pre-prepared design. Making things up as you go.

For this first session (out of five) our teacher threw us in at the deep end and tasked us with embroidering a self-portrait. Take a selfie with your phone and then translate it into embroidery – as if we were drawing a picture with needle and thread instead of a pencil. The task felt very challenging beforehand, since I don’t think of myself as particularly good at drawing even with a pencil. But we were there to have fun and, as the teacher kept reminding us, it’s not like middle school where we will be graded on our work. Nobody will check the tidiness of the rear of our embroidered piece; nobody will comment if the stitches are uneven.

We had just over an hour of stitching time and by the end of it I just had a few contours. No eyes, no mouth, no hair. But it’s clearly the beginnings of a face, and a reasonable likeness – if a stranger had to pick the model out of the whole class, they would likely pick me. So I’m pretty pleased with it. I had expected to get much further in the time we had. I’ll have to finish it at home.