As well as finished assessments, City and Guilds Part II students must produce a set of experimental stitch samples. Traditional techniques are covered in Part I, and in Part II we are supposed to develop them in a creative way, which means doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things.

These samples have to be related to a theme - mine was geology, including both minerals and fossils. Several of my works (not currently included in the site) have been based on ammonites, with their lovely satisfying spiral shapes.

This design started out as a skeleton of hammered copper wire, made in a sculpture evening class, which was covered with nappy liners painted and shrivelled with the heat gun, then densely hand stitched with various threads. It has been mounted on a sheet of paper pulp pressed into scrim, incorporating snippings of the embroidery threads and some small ammonites which were free machined on soluble paper.