25/07/2026
For those of you who have been following the Tokpa Studio journey since the beginning, you might know that I originally started this Instagram account as a place to share the things I was making while I was too unwell to work in my usual job in education.
Somehow, people started asking if the things I was making were for sale, and Tokpa Studio grew from there.
One of the early projects I worked on was slow stitching. I found it calming, and it was something I could do while keeping still, which was important at a time when I was often too dizzy or fatigued to move around very much.
I decided to teach myself some new embroidery stitches, using the Royal School of Needlework school website as my guide. To practise, I cut out 28 felt fish and stitched each one with different embroidery stitches and coloured threads.
You might even remember seeing some of these individual hand-embroidered felt fish popping up here on Instagram over the years.
Those 28 fish have been swimming around my studio for several years now. I wasn’t quite sure what they were waiting for, but I always felt they needed a job to do.
Then I came across this piece of an old bedsheet that I had dyed with indigo when Meng Hoeschle Studio was still operating here in Darwin. I stretched it over a second-hand frame I found at Frilly’s Op Shop, and finally, the fish have found their purpose.
A few years in the making, this is the result. 🐠💙🧡🧵
