Interview with Aimee Ray and a giveaway

We thrilled to have an interview with Aimee Ray - to celebrate her new book, Doodle Stitching - Embroidery & Beyond (read my review of it here). It's always fun to hear about the inspirations behind a book - especially when it's of the stitchy variety! At the bottom of the post we also have a giveaway of a copy of the book! But don't just skip the interview to get to that, there will be a quiz! Ok, not really... ;-)

Thank you, Aimee!

What inspired your new book? 
Since I first started embroidering, I've come across many different embroidery techniques that captured my interest and I wanted to try them out. I've never seen one book that served as a basic introduction to different types of embroidery beyond basic stitches, so that's what I set out to do with this book.

This book has a lot of different types of embroidery - did you learn something new while working on the book? 
I learned a lot! It was my first time experimenting with a lot of the techniques. I basically self-taught myself Cutwork, Stumpwork and Shisha stitches from many different sources and then simplified them to create my own designs and projects for the book. It was so much fun to research and dabble with new ideas and I know these new stitches will continue to find their way into my own projects.

What's your favourite type of embroidery from the book? 
I found myself really enjoying the Crewel projects. They are very time consuming and there are no shortcuts to creating a large Crewel piece. I'm normally a pretty fast paced person so it was nice to slow down and dive deeply into them and take my time to make them right.

Do you have a favourite project in the book? What inspired it? 
I particularly like the Crewel Family Tree, the pattern is inspired by traditional Jacobean crewelwork and I stitched it while I was expecting my baby boy. It's hanging on my livingroom wall now. :)

We have one copy of the book to give away.

To enter the giveaway:
Leave a comment on this post.
- you can not get extra entries by tweeting, liking on Facebook etc etc. One person, one entry.
- we'd love to hear about what kind of embroidery you'd like to try, but that is optional!

There must be a way to contact you, so make sure to either leave an email address, a link to your blog or somewhere else where an email can be found. We will not notify the winner by leaving a comment on your blog. You can also leave your Flickr name or Twitter @
Entries by 'Anonymous' can not be accepted, we must have atleast your first name - and a way to contact you as mentioned above.

The giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere.

The giveaway closes on Tuesday, March 5th at 8pm UK time.

Good luck!

The giveaway is now closed, thank you for entering!