I have something very, very exciting to blog about this week… a patch making course at the utterly brilliant London Embroidery Studio!!! This was really a very perfect day and course and if you want some added context for how unusual all of this was… I actually really like the patches I made!
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.
Traditionally, my first post of the new year is a chance to say welcome to the new year. This year I think I’ll break with traditional slightly and the new year’s post will be a chance to say goodbye to the old one! Well, 2020, what can I say?
Nothing like a good Christmas deadline to focus the mind and needle… Traditionally, I am terrible at Christmas. I barely manage to get Christmas cards to friends and people who definitely deserve it, even though I really appreciate everyone who is infinitely more competent, organised and takes the time to think of me. I usually deal with this by an absolute refusal to make handmade Christmas gifts, saving them for birthdays instead, but I did want to at least try and redeem myself as a human being this year…
After the success of my last monogrammed card, and as part of the greetings card factory that is now my apartment, I wanted to have a go at digitising and stitching out a more complex design… and including my favourite thing, more metallic thread. This design is a very simplified version of a beautiful cadel by Elen Verch Phelip and you can see some more of her amazing work on her website here. She seems to be a person of limitless talents!
Monograms are incredibly popular motifs with machine embroidery. With the speed of digital embroidery, it’s a quick way to transform a boring generic item into something a bit more special and personal. I absolutely love illuminated letters and fancy lettering too and really think they can easily be a work of art in themselves.
Machine embroidery is a lot of fun and there’s a huge wealth of designs out there that come both with the machine and are available either for free or a small price. As I did for my previous monogrammed card, these designs can be combined either on the machine itself or using some embroidery design software.
If you are into machine embroidery and haven’t seen Machine Embroidery Geek’s website, I really recommend taking a look. There’s lot of great resources but definitely my favourite part is where she justifies the cost of buying an embroidery machine with ‘how much you will save on gifts’. Perhaps I am a particularly miserly and uncharitable soul, but this seems like a very weak justification for which the maths does not add up, unless you attach a monetary value to the fun and joy that comes with making gifts on the machine.
