Freestyle machine embroidery

I've been working hard on extending my machine embroidery skills.  I've been following mainly a book called "Freestyle Machine Embroidery" by a textile artist I admire greatly,  Carol Shinn.  She gives lots of detailed information, and exercises which I found very useful to follow through.  The book is available from Amazon.  In the end I made a piece inspired by my recent holiday to Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory depicting my favourite scene - a Jabiru eyeing the river cautiously, as he was surrounded by saltwater crocodiles.

Jabiru, freestyle machine embroidery on soluble film using a loopy stitch worked upside down.  Appliqued to dyed and machined  background of nets and laces, 

Textile Books

A while ago I made a textile book out of habotai silk, but was unable to complete it, because I could not get the binding right.  I tried several methods of making these four double-sided pages stand up on a structure, so that I could exhibit it open.  None worked, the 12" pages were simply too big and floppy.  Lesson learned, don't make floppy pages if you want it to stand, use something solid inside the pages like heavy cardboard or buckram.

Anyway, I realised that if I was going to complete this project and relieve it of a life at the top of the cupboard, I would have to find another way.  I decided to do the obvious and put hinges on the pages in such a way that it would lie flat and the pages could be turned normally.  Being two silk pages with cotton batting in between and being hand-quilted (back when I could still hand-quilt) it needed something fairly delicate.  A rivet hole was going to be too harsh and heavy, dragging on the fabric and out of keeping.

I can't hand stitch holes any more so I tried a sample piece of machine stitching a circle, free motion stitching (feed dogs down, darning foot on, straight stitch).  Using plain white thread, this worked well.

The circular hole machine stitched around 3 or 4 times

Next step - cords to tie through the holes, which had been cut open with a seam ripper and applique scissors (carefully!). Here's how I used some strips of silk scraps to make machine cords (switch to zig zag, size 4 worked well) - the rest of the above machine settings remain the same.  Twist the strip round and round while anchored by the needle through the strip - have about an inch (a few centimetres) sticking out at the top to grab hold of - then feed the strip through.  The zig zag will keep the twist in and make a cord.  I made one for each hole (five) and fed them through, cut the ends off and tied each in a reef knot.  I did pull up the knots loosely at first and checked that the pages were turning comfortably, then tightened the knots.

The book with the tied hinges

"Breaking Boundaries" exhibition by the Textilers

The textile art group that I belong to, Textilers, has just held an exhibition in which we made the effort to break our artistic boundaries.  I would say that everyone succeeded very well.  It was a terrific show.  These are my own entries.

Meditation Bowl - totally recycled yarns from Op Shops over strips of recycled fabrics.  Boundary Broken - using traditional coiling with non-traditional basketry materials.

Phoenix Regenerating - rayons threads in machine-embroidered feathers and head, real feathers.  Boundary Broken - extending my machine embroidery skills.

detail of above

Rundle Mall.  Machine-stitched figures from my sketches.  Boundary Broken - drawing people, fifty years after being told I couldn't draw.

detail of above

Machine stitching feathers

I have been working on one of my favourite things – feathers.  I love the softness, the colours, of feathers.  A wall hanging I have just made combines stitched feathers with real ones.  

In the first picture, you can see a stitched semi-plume feather which is one that has the central shaft (the rachis) and vanes with barbs, but no barbules, which are the tiny hooks on the ends that zip the edges of the feather together and keep the shape.  So it looks much like a little fluffy Christmas tree.  You will notice how I have stitched this with a few machine stitches to a shred of wool roving and the feather itself is in variegated metallic thread.

The next picture shows a couple of feathers stitched in bright yellow rayon thread.  I have combined these with yellow wool roving and a real feather – that’s the white one.

I have left lots of loose threads because I like the texture, and it helps to give a slightly raised look, along with the feathers themselves being malleable, as they are stitched on water-soluble film.  Always do at least two lines over each other before dissolving.  The result if you don’t is distinctly weird!

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!