One of the things I’ve always liked about embroidery as a hobby is that you need very little “stuff” to enjoy it. Fabric, threads, needle, scissors – that’s about it for the essentials, and if your teeth are good and you’re not doing Hardanger you could probably dispense with the scissors (no, I wasn’t serious there). You can go mad and spend a fortune on hand-dyed fabrics, speciality threads, heritage-quality frames and stands, daylight lamps, silks, goldwork materials and what not, but you don’t have to. Nor is it the case that you can only do simple things or beginner’s projects if you stick to the basic equipment. A talented needleworker can produce works of art using standard cotton threads and plain fabric. It’s a great hobby!

That isn’t to say, of course, that I reject all equipment that isn’t strictly necessary. I could learn to stitch in hand, but I prefer using flexi-hoops – to me they make my stitching easier and more comfortable. More extravagantly, I love my Millennium frame and Aristo stand for larger projects; again, they make stitching more comfortable, and on top of that they are beautifully made and very strokeable .

Another piece of equipment I am very pleased to have found is my Vario Light Pad. I’ve got the A4 version, which is plenty big enough for any designs I’m likely to want to transfer. Yes, I could use a well-lit window and tape the design to it and place the fabric over it and try to draw on a vertical surface. Or I could use the prick-and-pounce method of transferring, about the only one that will work on practically any fabric, but that is more complicated and anyway requires its own equipment. But for transferring lots of small designs onto relatively thin fabric the light pad is unbeatable, especially in combination with very thin Pigma Micron drawing pens.

And so a couple of nights ago, while we watched the Queen’s 90th birthday party (recorded from ITV so we could whizz through the adverts and some of the more annoying presenters) I set about tracing another 26 Little Wildflower Gardens onto light blue cotton, stopping occasionally to give my full attention to the riding skills of the Azerbaijani horsemen (and women) or the percussion antics of the Swiss Top Secret Drum Corps (where do they practice drumming if they want to stay top secret?). A very pleasant combination of activities, and I’ve now got enough designs transferred for the next two workshops plus a few extra!