I have long been a great admirer of Mary Corbett’s blog Needle ‘n Thread, for her interesting posts about embroidery techniques and materials, for her inspiring projects, and for her brilliant video tutorials. Are French knots giving you trouble? Not quite sure how to work that chain stitch? Sometimes a description, diagram or drawing is simply not enough, while seeing someone work the stitch, accompanied by explanatory comments, may be just what you need to master it yourself. Highly recommended!

Quite a while ago I’d had a look at her video for cup stitch, but at that time I wasn’t really into 3D stitches, and so I never tried it. But the other day I was having a browse through the video library and came across it again – and noticed something in the written introduction which had completely passed me by before. I know why. It’s because at that time I didn’t have daffodils on the brain. But now I read: "If you combined it with the woven picot, for example, you could stitch some dimensional daffodils". Well, I can do woven picots! So clearly the time had come to try the raised cup stitch.

Obviously it would have to be yellow for a daffodil, and I think I would probably try and add a third row of stitches to make it a bit higher, but I can see definite potential there.

Then another stitch caught my attention, for its name as much as anything: Drizzle Stitch. It’s a twisted three-dimensional little blob pointing upwards from its fabric foundation. It was interesting to try, but I’m not quite sure what I’d do with it. Even so, it was fun to learn, and not nearly so complicated as I feared it might be. Who knows, one day it might come in handy!