We are delighted to announce that we have been developing a great new product and class to add to the London Embroidery School. The Pages Mushroom Online Class and Kit will be coming to the school next Friday and boy do we think that it’s a fun one.
Pages is a couture technique you may not have heard of but will likely have seen. Quite simple in its approach, pages are all about building up layers and layers of fabric to look like the pages of a book- hence the name.
Because of the approach, we wanted to find a way to make the class more exciting and usable than the way it is often taught. So whilst you will learn about how pages technique is usually used for couture garments, we will be applying our knowledge and practising the pages technique on an item you can’t have too many of… a pin cushion. And this isn’t just any pin cushion, velvet topped with a scattering of pearls and a weighted base this pin cushion can stand up to quite the stabbing. Finished off with pages featuring the gills of the mushroom- learning about couture fabric techniques never felt so practical.
But how did this class come to be? Well with a fair amount of development. This design has been through 6 stages as it has grown into the fully formed design it now is, ready for you to make it with us.
Even before that we were playing around with the pages technique and trying to decide on a way to present it to you, that would inform you about the style, but also leave you with something lovely. And in the process of developing some of our more traditional samples, we started to think that this particular arrangement looked like chanterelle mushrooms. This idea took hold and took us down a bit of a research rabbit hole that eventually popped out at creating a mushroom pincushion where the pages were the mushroom’s gills.
Then followed the pattern making and testing, we got pretty close with the pattern on the first sample, just trying it in a cheap calico and using whatever shades of organza we had to hand for the pages. But that frayed too much to look like it was on purpose and we wanted the pin cushion to be more hardwearing than that and we didn’t like the extra seam. So then we tried PVA dipped calico for thin but less fraying pages, but they all flopped to one side or the other but thought the velvet was great for the top. Then we subbed calico backed linen for the gills and tried a different way of applying the top, but that one didn’t even make it to getting a stem. Next up was the melton gills with the velvet top and velvet stem, but you can hardly even tell the stem is velvet and it made it all too wobbly. And for the last one, we played around with the order of construction, trying it out with the wine velvet too. Having tried everything we could think of, we picked out our favourite bits from each one and combined them all together to give you the finalised pattern.
If you would like to learn about pages and make your own pages pin cushion with us, the online class and kits will be out next Friday- sign up to the mailing list at the bottom of our website home page to be the first to be told when they are released.
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