Sally – my team leader – retires while I am in New York. I’ve known her for over a decade. We’ve ordered a lovely rustic bench to be made for her and I agreed to make some cushions for it.

I was intending to put some Sukie transfers on them (nice and easy…) but turns out I bought canvas and it’s too textured to iron the transfers on. So I decided I would have to do some of my sewing machine sketching. I know she loves sailing and often spends time in Wittering. So I did a cushion cover based on each.

I roughly sketch them with a pen. Then trace onto tracing paper and pin it onto the thing I want to embroider and then machine over the lines. The main lines I do 3 times – this makes it look sketchy and evens out my wobbly lines. I then do any shading in a mark-making fashion with 1 thread. Note to self tho – make sure you crack the tracing paper off BEFORE you do any shading. Otherwise you spend all night picking the paper out of the details with tweezers!

The Wittering one is more successful than the sailing one – but everyone seems to like them and I hope she will too.