Coo~!

My brain feels a bit like scrambled eggs at that moment… which may well explain today’s piece of machine embroidery! My completely obsessive love of over-challenging myself seems to have found new heights in my work and it’s very much this mix of being hugely excited by a lot of what is going on and going well, but also very much wanting a nap. Maybe now I’m at the point of embroidering people pigeons for their birthday cards I should perhaps consider the latter!

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Sampling with the Felt Detective

I’d had such a great experience with the badge felt at the class at London Embroidery Studio that I’ve been scouring the internet to try and find a supplier of something similar. This is always a challenge when you just have a sample of the material and you can’t exactly touch and check things online… Plus, I am always quite surprised how few places stock machine embroidery supplies. I guess this is partly as a lot of places that do cater more for the commercial end, so while 200 m of stabiliser sounds great, it’s probably not something you want to live with!

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Applique Engineering Solutions: Bernina CutWorks Tool

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.

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More Monograms at the Card Factory!

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!

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Making Freestanding Lace

As you might have noticed, I’ve been having a lot of fun with machine embroidery and one of the things I have been trying to do is explore all of the possibilities with the technique just to start building up some breadth of experience. I’ve recently invested in an assortment of different stabilisers and one of the things I was very keen to try was making freestanding lace, which requires dissolvable stabilisers.

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Digitising Monograms

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.

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