Cable stitch

Continuing with my machine embroidery experiments, I tried cable stitch – that it, working upside down so that the bobbin thread is the right side.  I used a red silk hand embroidery thread in the bobbin – wound on by hand – and white top thread.  The top tension is loosened, the bobbin tension tightened.  Do this a little at a time –it is better to buy a separate bobbin holder to use for machine embroidery tension loosening, as it can be hard to return the screw to the correct position for normal sewing.  The top thread will appear to be couching the bobbin thread and as the feed dogs are down, you can make the appearance of the couching very close to spread far apart.  In the small end of my paisley, you can see how working straight stitch rows on top of each other gives a heavy texture.  I can imagine this becoming valuable when working rock strata in a landscape, or various other more conceptual types of work.  Notice also how, on the curves, there evolves some straight stitches at right angles to the line of the bobbin thread – still the top thread coming through but it stretches out as you move the stitch line on a diagonal.  

Adelaide Rosella

The Adelaide Rosella is a local hybrid of the Yellow and Crimson Rosella.  Recently I started to spend more time on developing my skills in machine embroidery.  This is because arthritis prevents me from hand embroidery now.  So I decided to extend myself into this area, which I had previously touched on but nothing further.  I bought a book by Carol Shinn called Freestyle Machine Embroidery, and started working through the exercises.  Following the exercise on blending of colours, (feed dogs down) I completed my Adelaide Rosella by blending on the belly area, during which I found it was better to use the lighter colour to make the last layer or it didn’t show up enough.  It is important to have enough shades in the colour chosen that are close enough to grade smoothly, and I found that harder than I expected – my orange-yellows blended better than did my orange-reds, you can see that in the photo.  Once more a hoop upside down was important to avoid too much distortion (that will be a future project in itself, using distortion for effect) and frequent steam pressing on the wrong side was important also to pull out the inevitable buckling that does occur.  In her book Carol Shinn gives detailed instructions for colour blending – a terrific resource.

Machine Sketching

Early this year I started working on something I had not attempted for 50 years – figure sketching.  When I was at school, I was told I had no artistic ability, after drawing a circus scene complete with many people in it.  Since then I had no confidence in my drawing and only made stick people.  This year the group I belong to, Textilers, will be mounting our first exhibition.  The name and the aim is Breaking Boundaries – so I thought it was time to resurrect my figure sketching, and I then intended to stitch around the lines.  As usual I looked for and found an appropriate book on the subject, Stitch Draw by Rosie James.  I spent many hours in the next few months observing closely, trying and trying again, and drawing the people I saw in Rundle Mall in Adelaide, one of my regular haunts.  Sitting having a cappuccino means people don’t notice that you are sketching the people around you.  There were some fascinating groups of people at tables, walking around, shopping, using mobile phones and so on.  The fashions they wore interested me as much as the sketches I made, and interpreting them in machine stitch was the enjoyable end result.  I used various backgrounds, such as strips of dyed silk (seen here) using gold and rayon threads; also I used plain colour backgrounds with contrasting stitch colours.  Generally I liked to trace my original sketches onto white or coloured tissue paper and stitch through that, using a hoop upside down, with free motion straight stitch.  The paper could then be removed or left on in places for effect.  Fun!