London Embroidery School

Central London Embroidery School

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Lace Applique Online Class

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Let us introduce you to the beautiful art of Lace Applique in this hour long class from the London Embroidery School. Stitching along side us,you learn how to select, prepare and apply your lace for a stunning finish every time. With particular emphasis on the stitch techniques and tension of your lace, you can be confident in using your new applique skills.

Kits are also available to go along side this class if you wish to work on the same paisley lace pattern as us, however the approach can be applied to any lace you desire.  Lace Applique allows you to create relatively swift embroidered coverage, perfect for bridal, sprucing up older garments, or to use as a repair method for damaged fabrics that need some love.

Once purchased, the link to the class will be delivered to your email, taking you directly to the full class. You can watch the video as many times as you like, at your own convenience, in the comfort of your home.

Head over to the online classes section to purchase this class and kit to get started.

An Update regarding Covid-19 (coronavirus)

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There is no doubt about it, these are uncertain times for all of us.

To protect our staff and customers during Covid 19, we have postponed all classes from this Monday 23rd March until the end of May. We will contact you all individually if you have a booking to find dates that suit you, once it is safe to do so.   This may take a little while so please bear with us.

London Embroidery School web shop will remain open.

Here at the London Embroidery School we will continue to innovate and we will hopefully bring you some rays of stitching sunshine over the next few weeks.  We appreciate the outpouring of support from our embroidery community, friends, loved ones and newly met neighbours and are looking forward to making a positive contribution back to our local and stitching communities.

We are also excited to see what our amazing crafting team are getting up to during their social distancing and will be sharing it all via our Instagram and Facebook, so follow to stay up to date.  We would love to see what you’re up to, tag us with your stitching achievements on instagram, facebook or email us.

Stay safe, keep creative let’s make the best of this!

Out of the Blue: 50 Years of the Designers Guild at the FTM

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The Designers Guild is a renowned design studio that has played a key role in the world of interiors. Established in 1970 by Tricia Guild OBE, the Designers Guild has since reinvented interior design within our homes. From furnishing fabrics,wallcovering and upholstery to bed and bath collections, it has grown from its humble beginnings in London to becoming an influential global successful brand.

Out of the Blue: Fifty Years of Designers Guild is the exhibition currently being held in celebration of its long history and influential power at the Fashion and Textiles Museum in London. It explores the creative approach of Designers Guild’s founder, Tricia Guild OBE, looking at her inspiration, design methodology and the techniques, processes and materials that go into each and every collection.

The museum first leads into a sitting space that showcases the beautiful wallpaper that was specially designed to celebrate the Out of the Blue exhibition in all its majestic beauty and detail. It is here that you can witness the evolution of the initial hand painted imagery into its finished high quality digitally printed wallpaper as well as a chance to sit down to flick through fabric samples and the accompanying exhibition book, ‘Out of the Blue: Fifty Years of Designers Guild’.

The early years

This leads onto the main exhibition space that gives us an insight to the unique collections that the studio has created over the years. This includes the Village Collection, created within the early years, rich with colours and a unique style, as well as a look into Tricia Guild’s love for floral designs that has played a key role throughout Designers Guild’s history through the Flower Power space.

Travellers’ Tales: Indian Summer       Travellers’ Tales: Venetian

In contrast, the collections for Travellers’ tales brand shows the impact of different cultures within the Designers Guild’s collections. The Venetian collection draws inspiration from the elegant ornate designs of the Italian Renaissance and the Indian Summer collection is cleverly draped to invoke the feeling of summer and rich culture alongside its beautiful colours.

The Shape of Modernity

The Designers Guild has also looked towards Modernism through The Shape of Modernity which combines many products both current and in the past, often as a result of working in collaboration with many designers, resulting in a stunning space that is full of geometric patterns and ombre patterns that are digitally printed today at a large scale.

        Silks                         Embroidery and crewel work

The upstairs exhibition space explores the design process that goes into each collection. With displays looking at silk and embroidery it looks at the fabrics, colours to techniques and the target audience. These aspects that are carefully considered and laid out alongside their finished products, giving us the insight into the inspiration and the carefully thought out properties of each object.

There is also a particular emphasis towards the importance of moodboards and hand painting techniques. With every collection, Tricia Guild always starts with mood boards that draw inspiration from numerous sources such as architecture and fashion. Using these moodboards the design studio experiment with hand painted imagery before getting developed and refined digitally. While the use of rotary screen printing used in the beginning has been replaced by digital printing in 2010, each design starts of life by being hand drawn before being developed into the highest quality products and designs.

 

Overall, this exhibition is a great celebration of the fifty years of Designers Guild with a fantastic insight into the history and the collections. A fantastic source of inspiration for those that are passionate about the home and interiors and I can’t wait to see what the next fifty years will bring.

 

Words and photos by Jenny Li

Out of the Blue: Fifty Years of Designers Guild

14 February – 14 June 2020

Fashion and Textile Museum,

83 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3XF

Opening Hours:

Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm

Thursdays until 8pm

Sundays until 5pm

Ticket Pricing: £9.90 Adults / £8.80 concessions / £7 Students / Free entry for under 12s

 

Alexander McQueen Flagship

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London is very lucky to be able to offer a wealth of great free exhibitions and museums on many subjects. This open to all attitude really helps to keep feeding the minds of our designers and innovaters that one can go out and have your eyes opened to all sorts of  information. One such jem that might be a little lesser known is the top floor of the flagship Alexander McQueen store on Old Bond Street.

They have started to use the stop floor as more of an exhibition type space, sharing insights from the vast archives that the house of McQueen holds. At the moment, the space is dedicated to roses, curated by the Creative Director Sarah Burton.

What we found really special about this space, as an embroiderer in particular is that you can get right up close to the pieces to see the details often lost in show and large scale exhibitions. Something that we found even with very well done exhibitions like Savage Beauty. In addition to this they are sharing a lot of the background research and technical craftsmanship that goes into making a collection and show with this kind of dramatic results. There are development moodboards, fitting notes, embroidery placements onto pattern pieces and draping directed onto the model. There is also a viewing booth with footage from the shows to fully round out the experience and see it in the final context for which it was intended to be consumed.

If you find yourself in the area, it’s definately worth a trip it to see some beautiful things and get some of the background scoop on how these things all come together. The notes and quotes from behind the scenes really give you a sense of being emersed into their world. We are already looking forward

The Goldwork 5 Day Course

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Have you ever thought about taking one of our 5 day course? Is it really worth it?

We thought we would try and share with you a few glimpses into the progress of our recent students from our 5 day Goldwork Course so you can see what it is like to take the course and how much students can achieve in that time.

The 5 day course gives us the time to share with you some of the more detailed aspects of hand embroidery, thoroughly taking you through the preparation and execution of each stage. This means that when you are done, you will have the skills not only to embroider the beetle you work on in the class, but how you would apply those skills to other artworks of your own.

Once you have some of the base layers down, we start to move onto the ‘good stuff’, gold things!

For both beginners and intermediate levels, there are a whole range of techniques which are covered in the design, and it is clear to see the development in the proficiecty in each technique.

Every step of the way is guided by one of our lovely tutors, sharing their own personal tips and tricks along the way, accumulated from their professional experience.

Once all the techniques are covered, the rest of the design can be finished off later in the same style so you can see how far you have come.

5 days is quite an intensive course, as you can see, we fit a lot onto that time! It is also a luxury to take the time and really get stuck into these precious techniques, put in the practise and hone them. If you would like to find out more about joining our next 5 day course, follow the link to secure your place and join us in the studio.

 

Crewelwork, what is it anyway?

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What is crewel work?
Is it not just embroidery?

Well, yes and no, the stitches are often the same types so it can be a great technique to give you a good overview into a variety of stitches. However crewelwork usually refers specifically to the wool yarn used to stitch with which gives it is lovely texture and provides a new challenge to work with.

Amy Burt will be teaching her next crewelwork class which is on Sat 2nd Nov 10-4pm if you’d like to join her class and find out more for yourself.