Getting my hands dirty

The Contemporary Quiltgroup suitcase challenge was to make a quilt on the theme of "all in a days work". The closing date was 1st December and way back in August that seemed ages away. We went for a lovely walk down the lane to the beach and noticed that the hedgerows were full of ivy flowers and they were full of bees. So, this was going to form the basis for a design for my quilt.

 I had the idea of making stamps to print on some cloth and also to make some silk paper leaves as embellishment before adding the bees. However, things didn't go to plan. I used some procion dye for the silk fibre which I hoped would be lovely and bright, but the colours were a bit muted.

Not really the glowing colours I had hoped for and time is slipping away fast. I did manage to make some stamps using funky foam and have used my lovely new Geli plate to make some mono prints that I hoped would make an interesting background cloth.

Sadly this has just not happened. I have been doing other things with my DH and other family and friends, been on courses etc. I've had such a lot of fun playing with all these toys, getting my hands thoroughly coloured with paint and dye but the elusive design and indeed anything resembling a quilt is as far away as ever.
Does it matter though? Well, in the scheme of things no it doesn't, but I had hoped to be able to get a quilt made to the deadline just to satisfy myself that I could. What has happened though, is that I have actually been working at my sewing machine,  my art table and although there aren't any finished items yet, I'm convinced that is only a matter of time.
So the next deadline is to make something for the Embroiderer's Guild competition on the theme of tree rhythms and I've got until February. I can use a lot of the work I've already done towards the final piece so that will be the next focus.

Here is a mono print made using my Geli plate that I'm using as the basis for my design. This is a print from a log that I took out of our log basket!

It's about time I went and tried to get some of the paint and dye off my hands and got on with some stitching!

Righty tighty.....

lefty loosey!

It's  been a while since I did any free machine embroidery rather than free machine quilting and it isn't easy to switch between the two. Yes in theory you are using the machine in the same way for both, dropping the feed dogs and essentially writing with the needle, but there is a world of difference between them. Something that I took a while to realise.

For free machine quilting you need to maintain a constant speed; not too fast; not too slow and move your fabric "sandwich" smoothly in time with the speed of the machine. The aim is to keep all the stitches the same length and keep a flowing line of quilting without crossing over any lines. You need to look ahead of your needle so that you can see where to go next until the space you have chosen is filled.

For free machine embroidery,  the technique is very different. You still need to run the machine at a constant speed, but much faster and as you don't necessarily need the stitches to be a constant length, you can move your fabric as quickly or slowly as you wish. In fact you can keep the fabric still and not move it at all which creates lovely blobby lumps especially if you are using a zigzag stitch. You still need to move the fabric smoothly as  its easy to break the needle if your motion is too jerky. If you lower the bobbin tension, you can get the bobbin thread to show on the surface, or you can use a thicker thread in the bobbin and sew upside down. This gives you an opportunity to create lots of texture and if the stitching is dense enough, you can distort your fabric to create three dimensional effects. A really good book that describes the techniques is Machine Embroidery stitch techniques by Valerie Cambell Harding and Pamela Watts. Possibly now out of print, but worth searching for as it is very well written and gives really clear details of each stitch and how they can be developed. 

In this little sample, I've used perle cotton in the bobbin and ordinary white cotton in the needle to create the surf and turned it over so that I was stitching on the back. This can be a bit of a challenge so it's an idea to draw your design on the back of the piece so you can be sure you're in the right place.

This little sample was sewn on dissolvable fabric with perle cotton in the bobbin.

These little seascapes used all of the bobbin techniques to create lots of texture.

These are only practice pieces, but they will help when I come to do  seascape for real.

But, and there is a big but!  Fiddling with the bobbin tension can cause no end of problems and there are those who say, "never do it"!  I say, well if you want to create lots of texture just using threads, then sometimes you have to! What you need to do is keep one bobbin case absolutely unmeddled with and use another one to play with. This way you can use your machine to its fullest when free machining, but still know that if you want to sew a seam with a balanced stitch you can without any messing about with a screw driver.

Of course when you're going on a course where you know you're going to be free machining and using cable stitch, whip stitch and the like, it pays to take your fiddled about with bobbin case with you. Why didn't I do it then? Don't know. I do know that having realised that I only had my pristine bobbin case with me, if I wanted to get the best out of the course I had to bite the bullet and get out the screw driver! So I did and it has taken me two days to retrieve the correct setting for balanced sewing.  At least I didn't lose the screw!