The winner of the All Ireland Mountmellick Embroidery Competition 2017 is Deborah Love from Queensland in Australia.Congratulations to Deborah.
Deborah is a Queensland embroiderer and embroidery teacher who has been stitching for 20 years.She started embroidering as a young schoolgirl in the Queensland country town of Clermont, but rarely engaged in the craft until moving to Canberra 1991. Here she discovered the embroidery shop, Affinity Plus and Paddy Hornsby, who introduced her to talented embroiderers like Dianna Lampe and Kaye Pike. She attended many different classes in that year. In 1992, Deborah moved to Perth and joined the Embroiderers Guild of Western Australia where she taught new members in the local Claremont branch. She taught floral embroidery in three needlework shops in Perth and delved into many other areas of embroidery.
Over the years, Deborah has had various pieces of Mountmellick and Deerfield work published in Embroidery and Cross Stitch and Inspirations magazines. In 1998, the Queensland Museum purchased a Mountmellick pillow sham and the Embroidery Guild Queensland acquired a Mountmellick table runner in 1999.