​New Years Eve 2018 I was lucky enough to view the fireworks from the 10th floor balcony of a building that overlooks the Thames.  ​

When my parents moved house my Mum de-stashed (not by very much her home studio is still full!) I inherited some lovely metallic threads in a range of colours. ​ To play around with these threads I stitched this firework embroidery sampler. 

Some things I learned from stitching with metallic threads:​

• they tangle

• they split

• they wear at the point where they pass through the eye of the needle

• they are much rougher than normal embroidery floss

The top tip for working with metallic threads is to keep the lengths of threads you use much shorter than you would normally stitch with - this will help immensely with the tangling, splitting and wearing.

These threads are rougher than normal floss, normally as the metallic part is wrapped around a thinner inner thread. it can make some stitches such as French knots more challenging. It doesn’t mean you can’t stitch these, but I’d recommend so practice and patience! The rougher thread also means that trying to undo a tangle is particularly horrendous

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