Basic hand embroidery is so simple that anyone can do it, as long as you have somewhat decent eyesight and hand-eye coordination, and can follow along a basic tutorial in your preferred medium. If you can thread a needle, and make that needle go through fabric more or less where you intended, you can do it.

Achieving something that you’re happy with can be harder. Some skill gaps you can work around, or ignore. Nobody else likes the colour combinations you choose? Who cares. Don’t like drawing? Stitch based on someone else’s design. Can’t keep your stitches and edges even? Stay away from formal styles and go for a more relaxed design with looser, more random stitches.

Or you can choose to lean into the gap and practise until you get better. I like a tidy, more formal look, but getting my stitches all straight and of equal length and at equal distance is hard. In some lucky situations I can measure things – I wouldn’t try to set down the basic lattice for latticework just by eyeballing distances. But that doesn’t work for basic stitching.

And even with the lattice being all at right angles and equal distances, I found it was still entirely possible to mess it up when it was time to couch it down at the crossing points. A millimetre here and a millimetre there, and the whole grid looked wonky. I ripped out all the small stitches and now I’m redoing them.

Practise, practise, and more practise.