Forthcoming Courses Include:

• Embroidery - Moving on from Cross Stitch
• Embroidery & Quilting - Magical Manipulations with Material
• Hand Embroidery Day Course: A Stitch with no Boundaries
• Introduction to Machine Embroidery (Day Course)
• Machine Embroidery Day Course: Inspired by Gustav Klimt
• Machine Embroidery, Textiles & Mixed Media

Tutors Include:

• Angie Hughes
• Diana Sanderson

Embroidery & Machine Embroidery 

A Brief History

People across the world have decorated material with thread for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings show clothes and hangings covered with embroidery and the Ancient Greeks wore quilted suits decorated with embroidery. The earliest surviving embroideries come from an area near to the Black Sea and date from about the fourth century BC.

Machine embroidery had to wait until the invention of the sewing machine. Although a British inventor, Thomas Saint, made an experimental machine in 1790, it wasn’t until the 1860s that the sewing machine was perfected by pooling the ideas of many other inventors. By then, sewing machines were in many factories and homes. Many machines had a number of attachments including binders, braid carriers, fillers and gatherers which enabled seamstresses to make the elaborate dresses which were popular at the time.

Sewing machines were invented for all kinds of specific jobs such as overlocking the edges of knitwear, embroidering and edging lace curtains, making umbrellas, sewing leather and binding books. In the 1920s, as electricity became more generally available in homes, electric sewing machines were introduced and today many modern machines have microprocessors to carry out a sequence of operations automatically.

Machines which could zigzag stitches were invented in the 1870s, but domestic swing needle machines weren’t available until the 1950s. There is some exquisite machine embroidery dating from the 1880s made on foot-powered treadle machines. Today much machine embroidery is mass-produced in factories but, together with hand embroidery, it has also become a popular and creative art.

See also

• Embroiderers' Guild - the UK's leading crafts association