We’re off! The first cushion is for Feline Welfare on the Isle of Wight. I thought I’d use this beautiful embroidered fabric Derek gave me, but I want something to do with cats in the middle so I’ve cut it with the pattern at the edges.

Unless your making something fairly funky, pattern placement is really important. I’ve found a lovely embroidery pattern with the outline of three cats faces which I’m going to use my whizzy embroidery machine to create. There are lots of embroidery machines on the market

, all sorts of prices. You need to know you’re going to use it a lot to make it worthwhile, but I love mine! You’ll find dozens of websites where you can buy patterns on-line. The kittens came from http://www.emblibrary.com .

To create the embroidery I need to carefully centre an embroidery hoop on the fabric, attach my laptop which now has the pattern on it, to my machine, look out some threads that will blend with the embroidery on the cloth and get cracking!

I’ve used chalk to create guide lines on the fabric so I can centre it in the hoop. It was easy to do because the pattern acted as a measure! Sometimes I’ll use pins to mark it out, you can iron it into quarters and use the creases but you need to know it will iron out again. You can also buy marker pens that fade with time which are great. The ones that need washing out are a bit of a pain because you’ll have to wash the cover when you’ve finished the embroidery.

This is a stiff fabric so I don’t need to use a stabiliser, but medium and fine fabrics need some help to make sure your stitches don’t pucker. Most are like paper that you put under the fabric in the hoop. I’ll show you other uses and types later!

Hooray, the machine has done its magic!