Stitched up is a needlework project whose aim is to bring you the designs you won’t find in the shops. Run as a company 10 years ago, it was founded by me, Jude Hanlon, because although I was addicted to doing cross stitch, I had difficulty finding designs which I liked. Never having been a “girly-girl” or especially attracted to soft toys and cute animals, it felt like the booming counted cross stitch market had a big fat me-sized gap in it.

My mother was an artist, sculptor and art teacher and always encouraged us to be creative, so it never occurred to me that designing my own kits was supposed to be challenging. And so I embarked on a career as a cross stitch designer, with the lofty qualification of art & Design GCSE and home schooling from an art college graduate in my arsenal.

At the time, I really loved the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, so that’s where I began. From there I moved on to more traditional Celtic designs, then drew on the work of other artists and used the work of native Australian artists as inspiration at one point.

Running the company that was Stitched Up Ltd was a valuable experience, but sadly it never paid the bills, so was mothballed just after our second child was born.

Indeed, it was mothballed so well that for a few years I thought I’d completely lost all of the designs I had come up with, which was… disappointing. Happily, just recently, my husband, one-time business partner and most enthusiastic cheerleader, Steve found the electronic casket containing stitched up and prised the lid off.

My intention, now that we are several years on from its first incarnation, is to offer the designs in their electronic versions: a process which would have been (to say the least) non-trivial before, but which thanks to the wonders of the internet is now much more straightforward. The pick of the crop will become available over the next few months, those with a back story will be presented as such, and the ones which really weren’t a very good idea (i.e. with an aesthetic appeal to at most one person, and even she isn’t that convinced any more) will be quietly left in the box.

There may even be a few new ones scattered in there… let’s ride this wave together!

Hello? Hello? Anybody there *echo* ?