A crafty WI friend of mine suggested having a go at one of the projects on our WI website with a group in Shropshire and having time to do these things right now, I looked forward to the challenge. It’s ages since I did any hand stitching and it seemed to be a pretty simple project to make a needlecase. It proved more tricky than it looked however. The felt was thick and moved about, the stitches in the design didn’t turn out as I hoped and I made a few changes as I went along, pulling it all out several times in the process.

I finished it - eventually - and was reasonably pleased with the end result, though as always, there were several things I’d have changed. As I was thinking about it, I wondered about replicating the design on my embroidery machine, uploading the pattern to the software and digitising it as a bit of an exercise, possibly to use in my teaching.

I spent much of yesterday morning fiddling about with the shapes, moving them about, resizing and getting them in the right place. It takes time…but eventually, I had something that looked OK. Ish.

Of course, there was the added complication of there being some applique in there too, but hey, my Bernina is a clever thing - cleverer than me! - and that was just one of the steps in the process. I decided to give it a go and see how it stitched out.

I didn’t bother with the “real” colours but simply wanted to see where the stitches went, checking they went where they should. There was one “mystery stitch”, way off course off the bottom edge - I have no idea where that came from and even going back to the programme and following it stitch by stitch, I couldn’t track it down. Never mind. It was going ok.

Having stitched it out with reasonable success, I thought I’d tweak a couple of bits here and there (I deleted the leaf which overlapped the white flower, for example) before stitching it out “for real”. I thought I’d leave it a day to get my mojo back as well - I find it’s time consuming to fiddle about like this too.

This morning, I came downstairs to the studio with renewed motivation to do the real thing. I hooped a layer of sticky stabiliser, but before I peeled off the cover sheet, I loaded the hoop into the machine.

The first step I’d planned into the stitching had four place markers so I knew exactly where to put the felt needlecase cover. I wanted the design to be in the right place of course. For a while I puzzled about why the design wasn’t in the centre of the hoop as it usually appears - until I remembered the mystery stitch!

I cut out the rectangle of cover sheet and stuck the felt in place on the adhesive surface.

Ready to go! I had actually cut the felt book cover a little larger than it needed to be, so that I could trim the edge later if necessary.

I realised then, I’d forgotten something.

If I were to replicate the hand stitched needlecase, I needed to find the right colour threads. I don’t have an enormous collection of machine embroidery thread, but I managed a pretty near match.

Time to begin! The first step was to allow the machine to stitch out three circles, marking the placement of the three applique felt shapes which were going to be there. You can see there’s the remains of a false start there too - it didn’t matter, because it was going to be covered up with a bit of felt in a minute.

I used a temporary fabric adhesive to hold the three circles in place ready for stitching.

Off I went. Of course, each time there was a colour change, the machine had to be rethreaded. It’s a slow process even though the needle threads automatically.

Even though I had done my best to get those felt circles the right size and in the right place, it still wasn’t quite as accurate as I’d have liked. Never mind, I’d get the scissors out later!

My machine was keeping track of where it was in the design, how many stitches were still to go and how far we were from the next colour change. I was ready to sew the leaves and stems now.

My machine was also starting to flash a warning…

The bobbin thread was running out. Aaaaagh!

At least, when the bobbin door is opened, the hoop retracts, remembering where it was so that once the bobbin is refilled, returned to the housing and rethreaded, the machine returns the hoop to the place where it left off and carries on sewing.

I was on to the last few bits of the design now and the centres of the flowers. I noticed the stitching could be better and realised that, when working the first half of the embroidery, I ought to have rethreaded the bobbin slightly differently. Hmm. Never mind - I’ll remember that for next time. (Hah!)

Ta dah! The embroidery bit was finished.

It was time to heave the huge (and very heavy) embroidery module off the machine and go back to sewing normally again.

The “inside front cover” has a loop stitched in place for a needle threaded or small pair of scissors.

There were also the pages to sew in place where the needles would sit.

Finally, the blanket stitch edge - an automatic pattern buried deep in the menu of choices, #720. I loaded it, adjusted the width and the stitch length before realising I wanted it reversed. I’m right-handed, prefer to feed my fabric into the machine from the left and stitch on the right side. In other words, that blanket stitch wasn’t going to stitch on the edge.

I had to find my instruction book because I couldn’t remember how to access this menu!

A single click of the button and it was done! Like most of these things, it took forever to find it…but once I had, two seconds sorted it.

I changed the foot, rethreaded the machine (again!) and set off round the edges to complete the last step.

More accurately, the last but one step because I got out a small pair of scissors and did a bit of trimming too!

The next time someone pops along and says that working with an embroidery machine is easy, because you simply press a button and let it get on with it, I’ll offer a list of all the challenges!

Unsurprisingly, after all of that, I also prefer the handstitched one.