Our homework for the embroidery course this week was to take a stitch and play around with it – explore and experiment. The teacher set very low expectations because many in the group are beginners, and I knew I wanted to do more than that.

I had bought the book that she based the course on and found a nice idea there. Take a square of fabric, divide it into smaller squares, and fill each one with a different variation of the stitch. The book suggested 3×3 squares and that seems very reasonable. But at the same time… if I only do nine variations on the same stitch, I’m not going to get any really interesting results. I need to get the obvious ones out of the way and get to the point where I need to push myself. 4×4 would be much better. But I decided to go all in and do 5×5 squares. Kind of going overboard, I know, but I think it’ll be good.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on it every evening this week. It’s a fair amount of work, but it’s also very relaxing. There are no expectations. I won’t be hanging it on the wall or on a piece of clothing or anything else. Nobody is going to look at it for more than a minute except for myself. Nobody will care how tidy the rear side is. (It totally isn’t. I wasted no time on fastening the ends at all. It’s all loose bits of yarn all over.)

Long stitches. Short stitches. Stitches of even lengths and of uneven ones. Lined up and offset. Thin yarn and thick yarn and even thicker yarn. Smooth cotton and fuzzy wool. Straight lines and curves. One colour, two colours, a gradient.