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!
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.
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.
There is a new member of the family that I have yet to have the pleasure of introducing you all to yet… My new Bernina 790 Plus. (Complete with embroidery module because the thing wasn’t monstrously huge enough without it).
One of the nice things about being in Switzerland, as well as the beautiful scenery, perfect trains and wonderful cheese, is the number of Bernina stores dotted about the place. Some of them are in surprising places, it often feels like you’ll see one in every small village, but they are usually excellent haberdasheries as well as sewing machine technology wonderlands.
On the north east side of Switzerland is the canton of Appenzell (well, Appenzell Innerrhoden and Appenzell Ausserrhoden if you want to be exact). Confusingly enough, the capital of Appenzell Innerrhoden is a village also called Appenzell, which is the largest village in the canton with a population of a whopping 6000 people.
