I have always been fascinated with bead embroidery. My mom taught me to sew at an early age, and embellishment was consistently a part of my stitching experience. We lived semi-rurally, in a time before fast Internet. My dad used to cart my sisters and me off to the library in town each week, where I would spend hours poring over sewing and craft books to learn as much as I could before it was time to go home.

A few years later, I made my senior prom dress from a pattern of my design and painstakingly hand-embroidered seed beads to accentuate the floral design of the fabric. I even finished the hem with a chain to weigh it down like a Chanel jacket hem because I remembered reading about that in Threads magazine. Naturally, my wedding dress was going to have beads.

When it did finally come time to start my wedding dress, I was intent on learning the best couture beadwork technique for the project, and I finally came across tambour embroidery on Pinterest. My wedding dress was my first tambour project, and what started as a love of beads swiftly evolved into a passion for the tambour technique—such a love that I started my second tambour project as soon as we came home from our wedding weekend.

Exploring the possibilities

Tambour embroidery is created with…