Meet the Maker

If you're on Instagram you've probably seen the #marchmeetthemaker that lots of creative people have been involved in this month.  I started doing it, posting a picture for each of the daily prompts... and lasted less than a week!

If I'm honest, I'm not that great with photo challenges and that type of thing and often fail to complete them but I really wanted to do this one.  Unfortunately my day job has been crazily busy recently - even more so than normal - and I've had little time to think of anything other than fire risk assessments.  I've even been dreaming about them!

So what I thought I'd do would be to do my own version of Meet the Maker with a bit of an "about me" blog post.  I've gained a few new followers over the past couple of months and I thought it might be good to tell you a bit about me. 

I'm Sam, as you probably will have gathered from my blog name if you didn't already know.  By day I work for a housing association as a fire risk surveyor, doing exciting stuff like inspecting fire escape routes and fire doors and writing reports. It's a job I never imagined myself doing to be honest and some days I'm not quite sure exactly how I came to be doing it.

Outside work I love all kinds of creative pursuits but sewing, and more often than not, free motion embroidery is my favourite.  I've been sewing for as long as I can remember and have made everything from soft toys to wedding dresses.

However my favourite thing to make is free motion embroidered portraits. I started doing them a couple of years ago with a series of David Bowie portraits and have a constantly growing list of other people to stitch.  My ultimate aim for a purely personal project is to stitch David Bowie in every one of his distinctive looks.  The next one I'm planning is the Goblin King from the film Labyrinth.

I love using quality fabrics in my work, with the exception of the black fabric used in the jumpsuit of the third portrait in the above line up, all the applique fabrics are either Liberty print cotton or small amounts of silk dupion.

I teach free motion embroidery at a couple of local sewing shops and recently taught a free motion embroidered portraits class at the Knitting and Stitching show, which went better than I could ever have hoped for.  You can read about that here.

Following that experience I'm currently working on some new portraits with a view to selling kits similar to those that we used during the workshop.  I'm working on images of Prince, Boy George and Adam Ant at the moment, with more to be added as time allows.

I still love making clothes when I have the time and my next dressmaking project will be a Spring coat using the Trend Patterns Drop Shoulder Coat pattern and some jade green cotton moleskin I bought recently.  I'm hoping to start working on that in the next few days and am trying to be good and make a toile before I jump in and cut my good fabric. 

I will also have some news about an exciting project I played a small part in soon, so watch this space!