Your tips for saving stabilizer are very practical. I have another hint for everybody. Do not throw away small rests of water soluble stabilizer. Rather collect them in a jar and if you embroider on a stretchy material, you can solve the rests in a little water and wetten the material before hooping. If you let it dry, the material will be stiff as if it was a woven one. Washing to remove all the stabilzier afterwards will restore the stretch (except where you embroidered of course)

I tried this technique with the water soluble film you put over thicker fabrics (toweling, kniting, felt etc) to prevent the embroidery stitches sinking into the pile, and so becoming less visible. The small pieces of w/s stabiliser were torn off from around the embroidery on a previous project and went into a small jam jar. Then I added some water, put the lid on and shook the jar to dissolve. I placed the fabric I wanted to stiffen (it was voile, so had little 'body' of its own) onto a tray with a smooth, non-porous surface, and used a paint brush to soak the area of the fabric I wanted to embroider (+ a margin around it) with the liquid mix. Once all was dry I carefully peeled the fabric from the tray and stitched onto it. The end result worked quite well. It especially helped to reduce the distortion of the loose weave of the fabric, which can sometimes be very bad if you just stabilise on the back.

For what type of fabric did you do this?

It was a voile with quite an open weave, so lacking in 'body' and with threads that otherwise distorted a lot. Adding the liquid mix kept them more 'glued' into position, and of course washed away afterwards. I had to be careful which embroidery I chose to use, it had to be something designed for free standing lace so it held into position after after the wash away had gone.

Thank you

Hazel, perhaps we should set you a challenge to embroider out at least 10 of your beautiful designs on a variety of fabrics that are not your usual favourite silk or net. I for one would be interested to see your pictures and videos describing what you did, and how you got on. I'm sure we all could learn something from that exercise, whether they are fabrics, backings, techniques etc that we have tried for ourselves or not.

Interesting idea. I would love to do this at some point.