I may have gone slightly ‘in the hoop’ project mad… as you can see from this week’s bookmark! An artful blend of fabric engineering, custom digitising, tassel-making and rope making! This was another of my classic, ‘oh this seems like a good idea’ projects that snowballs into some concoction of complications.
I really enjoyed making my little applique cat but one of the parts I disliked about the project and applique more generally is the cutting. With an embroidery machine that thinks 1 mm is equivalent to a country mile, precision is the name of the game and I don’t think I’m going to be in competition with Swiss engineering any time soon… Luckily I don’t have to be, as of course Swiss engineering has the answer to all of my cutting woes, in the form of the Bernina CutWorks tool.
Last week’s post marked a dangerous turning point in my machine embroidery confidence where I realised that doing multi-part construction wasn’t so bad after all and, while getting things aligned with dielines wasn’t fun, it was feasible.
A while ago, I had a go at designing and digitising my own patches. It wasn’t a complete failure, but far from a success either. One of the big problems I’d had was not having a strong enough water-soluble stabiliser so the design ended up not really registering properly as it moved as the layers were being sewn together…
My craft frustration threshold has been feeling rather low of late. I seem to go through phases where every project I touch transforms into a mess of tangled threads and wonkily cut fabrics and please don’t ask how trying to stitch some curved seams went the other weekend. I will have to wait a bit to blog about one particularly glorious failure other the post will need a ‘strong language and description of scenes of great violence’ disclaimer over the top of it otherwise…
astitchornine 