About Pintangle

Pintangle focuses on contemporary hand embroidery and crazy quilting. You will find my stitch dictionary of hand embroidery tutorials and, free hand embroidery patterns. I also host the Take a Stitch Tuesday (TAST) challenge here on Pintangle. I mainly focus on contemporary hand embroidery and crazy quilting as my aim is to promote and encourage contemporary hand embroidery as a form of self expression.

My books!

The first is  The Visual Guide to Crazy Quilting Design: Simple Stitches, Stunning Results  which shares detailed practical methods about how to design and make a crazy quilt. From fabric choice, to balancing colour, texture and pattern, in order to balance and direct the eye around the block.  I cover how to stitch, build decorative seam treatments in interesting and creative ways. My book is profusely illustrated as my aim was to be practical and inspiring.

The second is  Creative Stitches for Contemporary Embroidery: Visual Guide to 120 Essential Stitches for Stunning Designs

Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned embroiderer, Creative Stitches for Contemporary Embroidery gives you techniques to encourage and develop a fresh and creative embroidery style. Discover play points in your embroidery. Explore variations in height and width, stacking stitches, or using repetitions of the same stitch to create areas of texture and shape. All these techniques and more will give you creative variations. I have included numerous demonstrations of small tweaks that create big effects. To send you down your own creative path, the book is richly illustrated with plenty of eye candy.

My stitchers templates

In 2013 I had the thrill of imagining a product, designing the perfect item for me and then taking it that step further to be  manufactured. It was a great thrill to have something made that did not exist before other than in my imagination. I am speaking of my Crazy Quilters Templates which I sell here on Pintangle.

There is a series of articles on my crazy quilt I dropped the button box  which features a free crazy quilt block pattern with each article.

The site also houses  A Brief History of Samplers, and Pintangle holds my own quirky sampler project which is a hand embroidered sampler of 100 feet long and still growing. On Pintangle you will find many fiber related tutorials and stitchers worksheets.

A little back story

I am trained in the visual arts and taught at the Textiles workshop at the Canberra School of Art which is part of the Australian National University. I have always been interested in textiles and technology and my career shifted to teaching Web Design. It was in this capacity that I first encountered blogs in 2001. After reading many blogs I started writing my own in January 2004 and it’s been a wonderful crazy hectic ride ever since. Keeping a blog literally changed my life.

I am now full time in my studio and am thoroughly enjoying life. I occasionally travel to teach and present workshops in hand embroidery and/or crazy quilting. In 2011 I was fortunate enough to travel to teach at An Adventure in Crazy Quilting at Glastonbury, Connecticut, USA. It was a load of fun.

Other Places I am Online

In a Minute Ago  explores the rich diversity of contemporary journals and journaling techniques, offering ideas and prompts to have fun with. At the moment I am not very active.

One of my past projects is titled “Wisdom of the Ages” I asked the public to respond to the question: What lesson have you learnt in life? With this project I aimed to create a snap shot of common sense or popular wisdom. The idea was to simply to share some of the lessons in life and hopefully people will take pleasure in reading and responding to it. This project is no longer active but archived here

There are also a number of projects that I have run in order to raise money for charity. Some are archived here All that Jazz was a fundraiser for survivors of the Katrina hurricane disaster. I still host a site where can see the quilts and individual blocks here on In a minute Ago as I am very proud to have organised this.

Can-Bra was another charity project. The First National Crazy Quilt Retreat was held here in Canberra in October 2004. Attendees were invited to decorate a bra in order to raise funds for Breast cancer research.

Bags of Fun was a challenge run in late 2005 between September and November. The idea was to make a bag or container of some sort, from recycled jeans embellishing them using any technique available. I had so much fun with this challenge that I am often tempted to propose it again.

I live in Canberra Australia in one of the suburbs that was hit by the firestorm on January 18 2003. “Safe as Houses” is a small crazy quilt I made in response to the fires.

Past Exhibitions

As I have said above I am trained in the visual arts and have exhibited work. Past textile exhibitions have been archived as they stood. So if the sites look a bit old fashioned some sections are over 20 years old!

Samplers and Sampling was exhibited in 1995 and went on the website in 1996. Samplers and digital technology both manipulate information in a manner that questions the value of the ‘original’. This question surrounding a value system associated with an ‘original’ object has proved to be a fascinating theme which weaves itself constantly through out all my work.

Playing False was exhibited in 1997 and it is the first body of work in which I looked at how the internet was being used. For this project I took screen shots of women’s homepages with their permission. I then digitally manipulated the image with Adobe Photoshop, printed the image on fabric and embroidered them. These stitcheries were mounted on small panels and exhibited in groups of 4.

“Reflections in the Screen : playing in mixed reality” was an experimental project that was part of the “Craft is Dead -Long live Craft” exhibition held at the Craft Victoria Gallery in 1998.

Abbreviations was held in May of 1998 at the ANCA Gallery in Canberra ACT Australia. With this particular group of works I explored the idea of virtual travel.

In the Shareware Project in the year 2000 I explored the notion of cultural exchange and how it is tied to narrative. I wanted illustrate the social aspects of textile communities online. At the time I had my stitch dictionary free online. I requested that people who use my Stitch Collection pay me for it- a ‘shareware payment’ but I was not interested in money but interested in their story. I asked people to send me a piece of fabric, a button, or lace that had a story associated with it. Once recieved I then scanned the objects and using Photoshop, worked a series of postcards. When I made the shareware project blogging software was not around, Social media as we know it today did not exist, in fact Facebook was founded 4 years after this exhibition. I built a site and illustrated the stories associated with the items I had been sent, at the same time illustrating the process of creating a “postcard” from the materials sent to me. The idea was to illustrate social contact online but remember this was before we had ideas of social media.

Please note that these projects were archived as they stood at the time of publication. I have an extended page which covers the ideas that drive my work and an artist statement.

For Students

For those students that drop me an email because they have to write about a contemporary fiber artist.  I have an extended about page and an artist’s statement  on my static website In a Minute Ago. If you really can’t find an answer to a question feel free to email me, but I won’t write your essay for you. If the answer is on either of those pages, I will be mean and simply redirect you back to these pages to look, think and write. Sorry but  that is what research involves, and yes you can have an image or two for your essay providing you credit me as the source.

Comments Policy

All comments are moderated to keep out spam. Comments that are racist, sexist or made by people who like to offend or stir up trouble are deleted and ignored.

Privacy Policy

I have a firm commitment to your privacy you can read my Privacy Policy here

Affiliate links and adverts

I have adverts and Amazon affiliate links on the website to offset costs associated with running it. This means if you click on a advert I get a small financial reward or if you follow a link to amazon and purchase a product I get a percentage of the sale. This is not at any increased cost to you. I never create articles purely to promote affiliate links nor do I recommend anything that I have not used. I only ever talk about products that I think my readers will find useful.  Also if you buy a product via an affiliate link this does not add to what you pay — the commission comes from Amazon’s profit on the item sold.

Wipes brow and thinks to self that should keep everyone happy. Enjoy the blog!

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