August Samples

18/31 Chain stitch on soluble fabric  (that's 2018, week 31 by the way!)
A technique geek one this time. Not many people seem to play with hand embroidery on dissolvable film, but I can't resist. It's quite challenging... try it and you'll see!

I worked rows of chain stitch in grey, blue and turquoise pearl cotton, adjacent but not linked. Then to hold them together I threaded pink-mauve through the straight stitches that appear on the back of the fabric when you stitch chains.

Carefully dissolved, and voila! A fabric made of chain stitch embroidery. So what if it'd be quicker to knit, this is something different. But which side is best? The back looks like this:

 

18/32 Pattern Stitch fabric

Still in the mood for creating "fabric" from just stitches on dissolvable film, this time I went with machine embroidery. But built-in, automatic embroidery patterns, not free machining.

 

Thinking of the sea (it's right in front of my desk!) I chose a curled, wavy pattern:

I stitched three layers of this pattern on Romeo, working from dark at the bottom to light at the top. By the third layer, the Bernina had sussed that I wasn't using its pretty patterns as intended and started protesting by breaking the thread, but I pushed it on - I am very cruel to that machine.

In the end it was quite successful. I deliberately (honest) didn't align the stitches of each row, but it's all stayed together well and the curly pattern shows in places.

   

18/33 Gannet eye

I love watching gannets diving for fish in the bay - they're so spectacular! They look amazing close up too...

 Solid free machining (sometimes called thread painting) on calico.

 

18/34 Hand embroidery in air

There's such a craze for "hoop art" at the moment - embroidery displayed in the hoop used to make it. So of course I have to try it with dissolvable fabric!    

 

I decided I'd need a solid fabric edge, as tying a lacy confection onto the hoop would be messy at best. So I hooped up some felt with my dissolvable film and made sure all the stitching was attached to that.

I used tiny circles of felt for the flower centres - you do need somewhere to fasten threads on and off! They're linked with green running stitch, knotted at the junctions. Then simple straight stitch for the flower petals and French knots for the centres.     

 

18/35 Felt jewellery

For a change, I followed an online course in Wool Felt Jewellery throughout August. It was great fun, I can highly recommend Fiona Duthie's courses! 

 

We learned all sorts of techniques to make wet felted beads, cords and lace. I especially loved the cords, and made several bangles. I haven't done a lot of felting, so there was a lot to learn; I made sure I tried everything while there was someone to consult - Fiona and other students were very helpful.

 

My final experiment was this brooch idea, combining the felt I'd made with a bit of free machining on dissolvable fabric.        

It's a felt bead trapped in flat felt as it was made, then revealed as an "inclusion". I cut out the circle, then stitched it onto a larger circle of felt that I'd edged with cable stitch worked on Solufleece.

I focussed so much on learning all the new techniques that I ran out of time for making finished pieces. But I still want to make myself a cord necklace, with slider beads and inclusions.

It was wonderful to find I could make small felt pieces at my desk without getting water everywhere. Now I know that I'll definitely do more wet felting to combine with my stitching.
  

Samples 2016: Week 47, Illumination/Earth

Had a bright (literally!) idea here to avoid using dull earthy colours again... the colours of planet Earth from space! So I got away with bright blue and green.

 

And then for the design theme, I used Blackpool Illuminations. So I was free to use my favourite FME on dissolvable fabric to make this lacy little sample. Freely stitched on hooped Solufleece, dissolved and pinned out to dry. Finally photographed raised on pins for yet more shadow play!

Samples 2016: Week 41, Geometric/Lollipop

Geometric design? A good excuse to play with dissolvable fabric, as if I needed one! Free machining it is then, on Solufleece. I made a simple network of triangles, with three different straight stitch fillings, then zigzagged over the outlines to make sure it held together nicely.

I guess lollipops could be any colour these days, but blue wouldn't seem right to me so I stuck with classic fruity colours.

An openwork sample like this just has to be pinned up for its photograph, I can't resist seeing its shadow pattern. Oooh...

Samples 2016: Week 22, Explosion/Fire

Um...on second thoughts, perhaps I should have done this on a background fabric?! It would've been just as effective. But my stitch brain isn't wired that way - I went with my first thought, doing without the fabric and using soluble films to stitch the wool fibres, FME of course.

I didn't cheat with the theme/colour combo, honest - just sheer chance that "explosion" was paired with "fire"!

Samples 2016: Week 11, Lacy/Orchard

Pleased with my little light bulb moment here. The randomly allocated design and colour themes aren't supposed to be linked, but it dawned on me that plant cells would be perfect for a lacy sample in orchard colours.

So I based this on a copyright-free drawing of a grass stem by R. Annheiser, in " Microscopic Art Forms from the Plant World".

It's free machine embroidery on Aquasol.

Samples 2015: Week 36, Stalactites

Free machine embroidery on dissolvable fabric, using a subtly shaded green-cream-pink rayon thread. Two strips of stalactites overlaid. No background fabric, I photographed it against black but the camera (sorry, I – I shouldn’t blame my tools) struggled to bring out the colours.

 

Source picture

From this article in the Saturday Guardian 05/09/15:

“Going underground: the Jeita Grotto, Qornet El Hamra, Lebanon. Artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige lose all sense of time and space, marvelling at the shapes and formations in this cavernous underground world.”

The Jeita Grotto, Lebanon, is a a huge concentration of extraordinary shapes. Photograph: Tim Barker/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image

Sample design

What appealed here was the idea of fringes of stalactites, I didn’t copy any actual section of the photo. I enjoyed this, and it might have some potential.   

Samples 2015: Week 19, Carnation ‘Blackjack’

Dark red velvet, 6cm square, embroidered with narrow free zigzag stitch in a shaded pink rayon 30 thread. I always find velvet... uncooperative! To put it politely. So this was a bit of a challenge for me. But as usual, it’s solubles to the rescue - I used Aquasol to carry the design and control the velvet pile, stretched in a hoop.

 

The unevenness of the stitching is on purpose, honest – I deliberately didn’t keep turning the hoop to keep the satin stitch straight along the lines, raggedy seemed more appropriate.

 

Source picture

From this article in the Saturday Guardian 09/05/15:

“Gardens: what to do this week. Try growing summer veg in raised beds made of straw, sow kale, and plant a modern carnation.”

Carnation ‘Blackjack’: ‘It’s clove-like scent makes it great for the cutting garden

Sample design
OK, so it’s a bad week when I have to resort to a photo from the gardening page. But I couldn’t stomach even opening a lot of the newspaper the day after the election results.

And then the obvious way forward for me with these flowers would’ve been layers of white-edged petals, so not that… I decided to pick out the pale outlines only, on a dark red velvet.

Samples 2015: Week 13, Herdwick

Machine and hand embroidery on soluble fabric.

First I free machined a network on Aquasol – see below. Then I filled it in with raised chain band using a mix of threads. The tricky thing with hand stitching on soluble is always fastening the ends in - there aren't many hiding places when the fabric is going to vanish!

Source picture

From this article in the Saturday Guardian 28/03/15:
“James Rebanks, Twitter’s favourite shepherd: ‘Sheep farming is another form of culture, just like Picasso or punk’. Shepherds are disappearing from the countryside — but there’s one in the Lake District who has 40,000 Twitter followers and an acclaimed memoir to his name. Over a day in the fields, James Rebanks explains why he’ll never give up on the life that has sustained his family for 600 years.”

One of Rebanks’ flock of 450 Herdwick sheep – a tough mountain breed synonymous with the Lake District. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Sample design
I loved the curve and banding of the horn, and wanted to do just that, not any more of the sheep. So making a free standing horn on soluble seemed apt (OK, any excuse for soluble).

Just machine stitching would be too flat, so I decided to use a technique I developed for a cuff (pattern here in my Etsy shop). Lovely nubbly raised chain band into a machined grid.

 

I’d nearly finished before it dawned on me that it didn’t have to be so… wholemeal! I didn't try to copy the actual shades, but the more I deviate from the source picture the better, so I should’ve used a completely different palette. At this point I wanted another go, imagining zingy rainbow hues. But, the other important lesson I try to learn from this project is to finish and move on, not try again. So wholemeal it is, sorry.  

Wood Anemones

Every year we have more and more wood anemones spreading across the garden - there's thousands now and they look wonderful.

Living on (in!) the edge of a wood, we really appreciate all the spring wild flowers as very little will bloom once the tree canopy closes.

In the mood for a bit of stitchy play, I happened to see a menu, offering something "three ways"... hmm. How about anemones three ways?
 

Machine embroidery using Flower Stitcher attachment 

 

Free machine embroidery on soluble fabric with scraps of thread and fabric

Crochet flowers on embellisher-ed felt/scrim background

I like the dissolvable machine embroidery best - no surprise there, then. But it does me good to try something different now and then... doesn't it?!