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!
First of all, thank you for your very lovely comments last week. I am very lucky to have such kind readers! I’m afraid I don’t have perhaps the prettiest of posts today, but it is on one of my favourite subjects, colour. One of the joys of playing with embroidery is not just playing with threads, textures and shapes but also playing with colours. Machine embroidery threads come in a really dazzling array of choices and I will say I have been building up quite the collection, but it’s still never really enough…
Well, I had rather hoped that my last post would mark a return to a regular schedule of blogging fun but it seems that was too optimistic. Normally, I find writing here very straightforward and a lot of fun as it’s the one place I just get to ‘write’ without worrying about briefs, absolute technical precision and everything everyone else has written on a topic in the last hundred years. Recently, though it feels like I’ve been suffering with a bit of ‘writer’s block’ which is very unusual!
lThank you all for your very lovely and thoughtful comments last week. Interesting as well to see how many of you also felt that you didn’t want to blog about the ‘thing we talk about all the time but don’t really want to discuss’. I’m afraid it’s not quite shiny things for this week’s outing, but is an adventure in digitising and the joy that are ESA fonts.
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!
Half the fun of blogging is sharing with people not when things go right, but when things go horribly wrong. I feel it’s a public service when I can make mistakes so you don’t have to. This week’s incident involved giving the Bernina a good, fabric meal to chew on…
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.
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…
Machine embroidery isn’t all greetings cards and monogrammed towels. It turns out you can make some rather complex things with it! I’ve been really interested in doing some stumpwork for a while, and made a start on a project, but doing hand embroidery of lots of small fiddly pieces, to go through the heartbreak of cutting them out and risking nipping a few threads is a rough way to learn!
astitchornine 