I'm Claire and I have loved hand stitching for as long as I can remember.​  



As a child I spent many hours drawing, painting and being creative.  My Mum taught me basic embroidery stitches and I continued embroidering other people's designs using kits, which more often than not was crass stitch.  After finishing school I then took the 'safe and sensible' path of studying Business and Finance at college, which then lead on to training as an accountant.  However in my spare time I continued stitching.  I even worked on cross stitch kits whilst listening to my revision tapes when revising for my accountancy exams!

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Having stuck to buying and stitching kits for so long, and admiring other people's embroidered pictures, I felt like I wanted to combine my Art skills with embroidering.  So after having my two sons I started going to weekly embroidery classes as a way to relax and have an evening to myself.  I have learnt so much from these classes, as everyone works on their own projects in different techniques.  This then lead me on to enrolling in distance learning City and Guilds courses in hand embroidery, which pushed me to try out all sorts of new ideas and techniques that I probably would never have got around to trying otherwise.

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I love to create designs inspired by floral and nature themes.  In addition to enjoying the tactile nature of hand embroidery, I love working with colour and have developed a passion for dyeing fabric and threads.  I take great delight in using my hand dyed fabrics and threads in my pieces, as I believe the random colouring of hand dyed materials adds extra interest to any piece of textile art.

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