Embroidery on mesh food covers

With my husband's unemployment and the big fire, the past months have majorly disrupted our lives. It isn't always easy to keep going whilst student numbers dwindle and webshop sales are low. And although you see the same thing happening to other excellent colleagues, you also see some embroidery businesses doing really well (or at least that's what their social media shows). This does make me feel very low and insecure at times. What's the way forward? One thing I am going to change over the coming months is the lay-out of my studio. At present it is completely geared towards embroidery tuition and webshop stock. As I want to stitch more myself in the new year, the new lay-out should better accommodate my own work routine. So, I have started to declutter and sort through my gigantic stash. And that's when I re-discovered a stack of mesh food covers!

A couple of years ago, I decorated the above food cover with silk ribbon and stumpwork as a gift for a friend. It was inspired by the embroidery of Lesley Turpin-Delport and Nikki Delport-Wepener. It was great fun to do, but it took a very long time and the end-result was maybe not very practical :).

So, in my search for 'quick' and 'practical', yet fun, I came up with the above. After all, the mesh of a food cover does resemble canvas. But beware! Not all food covers are equal. Some have a beautiful regular mesh and others have only partial regular mesh. Inspect them closely before using or you are in for a stint of backwards stitching.

Other points to keep in mind when you would like to pimp your food cover:
- be careful when carrying threads on the back...
- use long threads to minimize starting and ending...
- double your thread with the two tails in your needle and start with loop for anchoring on the back...

Have a fabulous week!