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Karen Ruane: Contemporary Hand Embroidery & Connections With Cloth

40 min • 11 april 2018

Karen Ruane is our guest today on the Stitchery Stories embroidery podcast. Karen shares her life as a contemporary hand embroidery artist who specialises in teaching and building supportive communities via online embroidery courses.

Listen as Karen shares her embroidery journey from Cross Stitch, through leisure classes and onto a degree when her children had flown the nest. Karen's main focus is teaching through her online embroidery courses, as well as some limited workshops in London. A key element of her online embroidery classes is the duration and levels of personal interaction, which helps build a very engaged and supportive online community with her students.

Susan Weeks chats with Karen about:

Artists Books created to store, display and protect small embroidery samples
The challenge of keeping up with your students when running longer term workshops
The logistics of running online embroidery workshops
Building strong community support in an online group
Making friends for life online AND meeting up In Real Life
From one Cross Stitch kit... Look at what's happened!
In-depth research into the role of the family and motherhood and the relationship with cloth
Using her embroidery as a way of staying connected with her grandmas and kids
Being inspired by her students and feeling connected to them through embroidery
Loving hand embroidery and embellishments
How many wraps of the needle to make a bullion knot???
The temptation to hide mistakes and the pressure to be perfect on social media
The value of showing mistakes as part of the online embroidery courses so students gain valuable learning
Allowing your personality to shine through video and students having the feeling of being in the room too, in that moment.
The massive elephant in the room....
The self imposed pressure of feeding your blog on a daily basis