pardalote

I'm Michelle (she/her/they)

I live in Australia - I make things with needle and thread, and I walk in the wild. I have degrees in science and education, and do STEM education writing/consulting.

I make strange little things in textiles and beads. I have a teeny webshop where I sell a small number of objects and I have a couple of online workshops and some downloadable tutorials and patterns.

ko-fi blog (no paywall) https://ko-fi.com/pardalote

website and shop - https://www.pardalotemakes.com/

learn to make beetles: https://pardalote.teachable.com/p/embroidered-beetle

my embroideries as online jigsaw puzzles: https://www.jigsawplanet.com/pardalote/embroidery

All my recent posts are my own work. All my nature photos are from my hiking adventures and are my own photos.

I'm currently closed for commissions.

I don't usually post other folks' work, but a very clever man name Nick Taylor, made this beautiful thing.

I can't even.

From this morning's Autumn walk in the forest.

In Australia our native plants aren't deciduous*, so our forests don't change colour, only the european trees that are planted in towns and farms etc do that.

Some more cutting, arranging, gluing. More shapes.

Hiiii! Nice to meet you!

First, a disclaimer. I'm in Australia, and I'm not sure where you are - so how much of this applies or makes sense will vary depending on your location.

I did a maths/physics degree and then went onto a teaching degree, then worked teaching in high schools. After a while I got a job with TasGov teaching teachers to use technology in educationally purposeful ways, did that for a few years. Then moved states and started working for a non-profit company that mainly does education work for government, initially casual/part time, but now I'm full time.

Currently, the area of the company I work in makes content for teachers/students/families on a project basis. EG the government will pay us to make a website full of maths resources to support maths teachers - some resources we write ourselves, but there are lots of good maths resources out there already, that we link across to as well.

My role is across two projects at the moment, and I have different work in each team, but basically my days are spent a) writing and managing education material for publication on our teams' sites, b) reviewing existing education material for inclusion in our sites, c) metadata and vocabulary work d) misc other work like delivering workshops at conferences, delivering webinars, hosting a podcast (lol!). It's pretty varied, but all centred around education and mainly STEM-based, because that's my background, so they are the kinds of projects I tend to get assigned to.

I'm not sure if that's super helpful, but I do want to say that the teaching thing has opened up a lot of doors for me. I really enjoyed teaching - at least the 'working with students' part of it, the admin and bureaucracy around it, not so much :D But I also kept my eyes open for other possibilities, and applied for things that interested me along the way.

I received so many questions about whether folks could use the words from my Oversight series, so I wrote a short blog post about my process and a quick note about reuse.