Architectural freehand embroidery - Northwood House Cowes

Thank you Instagram, I owe you a lot.

I was a late developer to social media and never quite fitted into the growing trend of sharing ones dinner photographs on Facebook and Twitter.

But when I started sewing again about 10 years ago, I turned to Instagram for a bit of needle and thread inspiration, it was such an easy no effort way to see what the rest of the world was sewing.

Can you believe that us of the art school dinosaur age used to have to go to a library (a place that houses books) to look up the work of other artists and creators. And if we wanted to record an idea to take away, we had the option of the library photocopier or drawing a sketch. I can vividly remember the hours spent browsing through the shelves of my most thumbed libraries: Brixham, Torquay main, Torquay tech and Birmingham city library. I miss those days, but do admit smart phones do save us an awful lot of time and effort!

Ten years ago, Instagram was quite a new exciting social media alternative to the “dinner story” Facebook. Beautiful still photographs of endless inspiration cascaded down my screen and instantly I was smitten.

This was one of the first videos I uploaded, freehand architectural embroidery. Instantly it went viral and I gained 1.5k new followers overnight. I was speechless, very proud and very excited. Commissions flooded in and I clocked up many sewing hours and lots of thread!

Over the years, due to relocation and lack of space, my threads have been stored and replaced with watercolours but one day I’ll get everything out of storage and stitch again.

These days Ive realised that quality is far better than quantity when it comes to Instagram and have filtered out those bots, scammers and strange users that from the overnight follower collection to create what I believe is a really lovely set of supportive friends, creatives and wonderful customers.

Thank you to everyone who has followed me for all of the years, and to all the newbies Ive picked up along the way, I couldn’t have done it without Instagram.