I was a child when I embroidered my first tea towel with the words “Time for Tea” along with a clock, a teapot and a teacup in stem stitch, chain stitch and lazy daisies. I don’t know what initially drew me to embroidery. Perhaps it was seeing an embroidered tablecloth or pillowcase and being fascinated by the colours, patterns and textures. I kept bugging my mother to teach me how and finally she acquiesced. She had learned some basic embroidery at school but did not enjoy it. She would much rather be outdoors collecting insects.
I loved embroidery and saved my allowance to buy kits and floss. As a teenager, I joined
the local embroidery guild as their first youth member and started designing my own pieces. Embroidery remained an important activity for me and was a counterbalance to the challenges of university and later the corporate world. In those days I couldn’t see how this pleasurable activity could be a viable career. Nonetheless, when you like to work with your hands, I don’t think that ever leaves you. I almost always had something in a basket that I could pick up and work on.
After 20 years in international finance and consulting, I ran out of steam. The economy had tanked, and I no longer had the interest or the energy to keep my consulting practice.
We bought a place in the country about two hours from Toronto. I saw beauty in everything around me: in the fruit and vegetables in my garden, in native flora and fauna, in the rural countryside, in the wonderful views… and I wanted to capture it all in fibre. One day I came in from gardening and dropped my gloves on a bench. When I came back, I was intrigued by how they landed and sketched them. From that drawing, I created a stitched artwork that I titled Ready. My intention was that the gloves were ready for the next task, but in retrospect, it’s now clear to me that I was ready for the next step, and ready to call myself an artist. That piece was juried into an exhibition at a commercial gallery, and I was launched. It took many years, but I finally found the courage to do what I always loved.
The natural environment around my studio in the Niagara Escarpment is a key influence
on my work. I’ve been interested in insects, particularly showy butterflies and buzzing bees, as long as I can remember, perhaps due to being the daughter of an entomologist. As they move from flower to flower collecting pollen, insects enable the continuation of our food crops and flowering plants. I have become increasingly aware of the changing patterns of bees and butterflies, and I am concerned about their declining populations due to habitat loss, pesticide use and disease. The environment has become the focus of much of my body of work.
I think of my stitched artwork as “drawn with thread.” In addition to embroidery, as a child I would spend hours drawing, creating finely shaded pencil sketches. In a way, I’m still doing that, but now with thread rather than coloured pencils. I use a variety of tools and techniques, choosing the ones that make most sense to me to achieve my desired effect. For two-dimensional work, I use a high-speed longarm sewing machine for much of the stitching. I don’t use a computer; it would just get in the way. Working with a high-speed machine requires a steady, practiced hand to control the stitches in a small space. My longarm doesn’t have a stitch regulator, so the stitch length varies according to how quickly or slowly I move the machine head. The direction I move the machine affects how the stitches lay, which then creates depth and texture. I use raised hand embroidery, layering and attaching independently formed elements, and sculpting with wire to create three-dimensional work.
An individual artwork begins when something captures my imagination.
It might be a luscious strawberry in my garden, for example. I was about to pick the strawberry and eat it when I thought, “Hmmm, that’s so gorgeous; I should draw it. And then, oh, I should do that in fabric and thread.”
Most days I go for what I call a “butterfly walk” outside my studio. I take a camera and see what’s about. Sometimes it’s a swallowtail butterfly flitting in my lilacs, a common eastern bumblebee pollinating rugosa roses, a monarch caterpillar munching on milkweed, or wildflowers swaying in the wind.
Taking my own photos enables me to capture brief and unexpected encounters with nature. Bumblebees simply don’t stay still long enough for me to draw them! The photos also enable me to return to the time, place and conditions that were present when I took the photo, even at a much later date. My photos document how I experienced the scene and provide important details that allow me to develop the artwork. Another photographer would capture the moment differently.
I consider and explore ways of presenting these chance occurrences. How should I do it? As a flat, stitched artwork? A dimensional stumpwork piece? Or perhaps a free-standing sculpture? What size? What colours? What perspective? What materials? What techniques? At this stage, I am also evaluating whether I have the tools, materials and skills I might need to complete the work.
The “aha!” moment is when the answers to those questions fall into place. They might come together relatively quickly, say within a few days of the sighting, or I might think about it on and off over a period of weeks, months or even years. It crystallizes when I have sketched out a composition and I have decided how I want to approach it.
Here is an example of my process to make a dimensional flower, rudbeckia laciniata. This dramatic native plant, sometimes commonly called yellow coneflower, grows to over 6 feet tall in my garden. I was thrilled to see a monarch butterfly nectaring on the blooms during one of my walks, took a few photos and later decided that I wanted to create a few flowers for a headdress.
[1] My original photos were from a distance and a much wider shot. Fortunately, they were fairly crisp, and I was able to crop them down to see the flowers and butterfly in reasonable detail.
[2] Drawing the flower helped me focus on the details. As I was going to be creating this flower out of season, I made notes on size, color and aspect from a local field guide of native wildflowers. Had I been doing it in-season, my notes would be from direct observation.
[3] While I was drawing, ideas on how to approach it began percolating through. I decided to create a three-dimensional flower with a combination of hand embroidery and machine stitching. I would need fabric and thread for the petals; felt, embroidery floss and batting for the cone; and wire for the stem.
[4] The cone is about 3⁄4″ tall and about 3⁄4″ diameter. I would hand embroider the very tight yellow-green disk florets at the tip with French knots and the looser yellow and brownish open florets at the base and sides with bullion knots, all on a felt base.
[5] The petals are roughly 1/2″ wide and 2″ long. Each flower has 8–12 petals and as I wanted to make several flowers, I would need to make multiples of that number. I densely stitched the petals individually with my longarm sewing machine using three bold hues of yellow thread. Then I carefully cut around the edge of each petal. The density of the stitching allows the petals to be pinched and shaped.
[6] For this flower, I hand-stitched 12 petals to the base of the cone.
[7] With needle nose pliers, I curled the end of a florist wire; wrapped a small piece of batting around that end; and inserted it into the cone. Given that the sepals wouldn’t really show on the headdress, I cut a single piece from felt rather than creating a more complex stitched or needle-woven set. I hand sewed the felt sepals to the base where the petals meet the cone.
[8] The finished flower is ready and waiting for the other elements for the headdress.
[9] The completed headdress has 3 rudbeckia laciniata, 5 rosa rugosa, 3 centaurea montana (bachelor’s buttons), 4 white oak leaves, a monarch butterfly and a northern amber bumblebee. All live in the area around my studio.
I intend to wear the headdress at the opening of my solo exhibition An Ode to Phoebe at Homer Watson House & Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario, April 4 – May 24, 2026.
In my earlier consulting career, I learned from cognitive psychologist and professor Teresa Amabile that creativity requires three components: knowledge, skill and motivation, with the most important of the three being intrinsic motivation. Looking back, intrinsic motivation drove my desire to learn about embroidery, develop my skills, experiment and to create original textile artworks about a favourite subject: the importance of pollinators to our environment.
My inspiration comes from the natural world around me. My motivation comes from wanting to communicate how important that natural world is. We must care for it and not take it for granted. In the words of the French writer, Voltaire: “We must cultivate our garden.”
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From Isabelle Fish | I find it totally fascinating that Tracey can visualize in her mind and then create three-dimensional works from just a limp material such as a piece of thread. She has incredible embroidery knowledge and skill and I am sure that along the way she invents stitches. Her colours are vivid, her butterflies ready to leave the canvas, her fields rustle in the wind, her tulips bend towards you—it is simply mesmerizing.
