Te Wero Tuia: The Stitch Challenge

The Dugald MacKenzie Rose Garden can be found nestled inside Palmerston North’s Victoria Esplanade.
Even though the roses will be dormant in July 2026, it’s still a beautiful place to visit and enjoy a stroll along the Manawatu River. The garden is named after Dugald MacKenzie, the superintendent of Parks and Reserves from 1946 to 1966 as he contributed significantly to the gardens development and opened in 1968. Photo: tripadvisor.com

Everything is coming up roses...

There was an excellent response to our new Stitch Challenge in the ANZEG National Exhibition in Dunedin with so many beautiful entries many of which featured in the 2025 ANZEG diary.
The great response means we will be offering Te Wero Tuia ~ The Stitch Challenge again in 2026 in Palmerston North at the ANZEG ‘Threads of Connection’ Conference.
The new design has been created once again for us by Evan Lewis, author of ‘A Garden of Curiosities – Renaissance Inspired Designs for Contemporary Crafting’.
For Dunedin he created the thistle design. This time he is celebrating Palmerston North’s status as a city of roses. Palmerston North is home to the Dugald MacKenzie Rose Garden which features more than 5000 roses in named beds and also contains the New Zealand Rose Society International Trial Beds. In the summer the city blooms with gorgeously coloured and scented roses in many public gardens.
Evan’s elegant design lends itself beautifully to embroidery. It is purposely simplified to give embroiderers the scope to create something beautiful. Te Wero Tuia ~ The Stitch Challenge is particularly designed for new embroiderers or stitchers who do not yet have the confidence to design their own embroidery for the national exhibition.

This time we will be splitting the competition into two sections.
One will be purely judged on the beauty of the embroidery – embroiderers are asked to present the design exactly as it is supplied in whatever technique and colour scheme they choose. Their stitching and technique will be the criteria against which their work will be judged.

The second section will be for those who would like to begin designing their own work using the rose design as a starting point. Anyone wishing to enter can treat the design in any way they choose, creating a new embroidery based on the supplied rose design.

The only other special criteria for this section are that the embroidery be mounted on an A4 (210x297mm) unframed board or canvas – which is a standard sized canvas – with D-rings (or V-rings) attached to the back for hanging and that it is mailed in a postbag of the appropriate size. This is to help keep mounting and postage affordable.

So, what are you waiting for? If you have never entered an exhibition before because you weren’t confident about your design skills, but you love to create with colour and stitch, then Te Wero Tuia is for you! Or if you enjoy having a design basis as a starting point from which to create new embroideries then Te Wero Tuia is also for you.
Fire up your imagination, copy or download the rose design pictured and start stitching this new challenge to be presented as part of our national biennial exhibition in Palmerston North in 2026.
Imagine a gallery wall covered in a myriad of different interpretations of this design – all gorgeously stitched in every colour of the rainbow, in every embroidery technique – limited only by the embroiderer’s imagination!

Reproduced from ANZEG Threads magazine #90, April 2025.

Meet the man behind the design:

Evan Lewis

The artist behind the design for Te Wero Tuia: The Embroidery Challenge is Evan Lewis and by the time this story appears in Threads, Evan should have another book to his credit: ‘A Garden of Curiosities’ – a collection of his beautiful designs subtitled ‘Renaissance-inspired Designs for Contemporary Crafting’ which was to be launched for sale at this year’s The Great Escape in Orewa.
Just how Evan came to be designing for ANZEG is down to Helensville embroiderer Jo Dixey who thought his work might be ideal for Te Wero Tuia. Jo has stitched a number of his designs already.
A friend and I visited Evan in Auckland to interview him for Threads and we had a most entertaining day, looking at his huge collection of designs, some of his beautiful calligraphy and gorgeously coloured Pysanky eggs and being treated to tea and cake and a sneak preview of his book.
Afterwards Evan sent me his biography which tells his story (and hopefully gives you an idea of his delightfully quirky personality) far better than I could. He wrote:
Evan Lewis is a jack of various trades. Born in London in May 1969 to New Zealand parents, he came home to Auckland’s North Shore at five months old and has lived in Torbay most of his 53 years.
Evan showed an interest in visual arts at an early age and this was fostered by a number of highly creative family members and some very generous teachers. In 1982 he won a Gold Award at an Annual International Children’s Art competition held in Taiwan.
After a few false starts Evan graduated from Auckland University in 2000 with a Master of Arts degree majoring in Art History. During his studies, he found work in the Archive of the Anglican Diocese of Auckland, which position eventually led him to become Archivist at Diocesan School for Girls and Dilworth School.
Recognising an interest in lettering, Evan’s father gave him calligraphy nibs on his 13th birthday and he slowly began to teach himself not just the formation of gothic letters but the craft of designing and executing the illuminated page. He has exhibited once or twice with the NZ Calligraphers Guild and held his first solo exhibition in December 2008.
Evan is also a capable if unenthusiastic gardener, a maker or rather a ‘writer’ of Pysanky (Ukrainian Easter Eggs), as well as being a published author with a first small book of poetry published in 2017 and a terrible book about gardening (‘Confessions of a Reluctant Gardener’) published together with illustrations by the author later in December 2019.
Since intermediate school days until her last years in 2008-09 he has drawn designs for his craftswoman mother to interpret in various media, and in the years since her death he has taken up her suggestion and created a range of embroidery/craft designs inspired by the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
He lives in his old family home with a cat, and an overdraft, and is notorious for not clearing his voicemail.

Stories and photos by Felicity Willis

Republished here from Threads magazine #86, April 2023.