The atelier
A small roomin Collingwood.
Two embroidery machines, a drawing table, and a filing cabinet that holds every stitch map we have made. Everything is drawn, stitched, finished and packed here.
Why embroidery
A printed photograph on a shirt fades in a year. Thread outlasts the garment it sits on.
We started because a friend asked for a portrait of a dog that had died, and everything available was printed polyester. Embroidery was the only method that felt equal to what was being asked. It is slower and more expensive, and it does not fade, crack or peel.
Each portrait is traced by hand rather than run through an auto-digitiser. An algorithm reads a photograph as pixels. A person reads it as an animal — which whisker matters, where the coat changes direction, which eye the light is in.
Materials
Nothing is made before it is ordered, so nothing is discounted at the end of a season and nothing is thrown away.
The archive
Nine hundredand forty records.
Every commission since 2023, filed with its stitch map. Clients come back years later for a second piece and we stitch it from the same file.