Embellishers and embroidery – The Accidental Embroiderer

The scruffy hare on the road…

27 October 2016MiaEmbellishers and embroidery6 Comments

The other day we saw a big hare calmly sitting in the middle of the road just above our house, and while we waited for him to get out of the way I thought vaguely of how I'd make a design out of him. This is the result. At first I was just going to call it “Hare on the Road” but perhaps “Scruffy Hare” would be more appropriate, as he turned out to have a rather moth-eaten appearance. This was because the hare seemed to be demanding to be appliqueed in some kind of furry, unkempt fabric, so I dragged out my embellisher and some old knitting yarn and spent some time making a nice furry fabric. The result wasn’t exactly slick, but then it wasn’t supposed to be so I went ahead and used it for the hare’s body.

The Hare on the Road with the moth-eaten coat

Well, yes, it sort of works, and I don’t mind the moth-eaten appearance, but next time I think I might do it differently. The eye isn’t quite right, and the overstitching on the body needs changing, but as I keep saying you never know how these things are going to turn out until you try them.

Another technical note: I stitched this out in rather a hurry, and when I looked at it after it was done I was horrified to see that I’d been in such a rush that I’d actually forgotten to put any stabiliser under it, so the embroidery is just done straight onto the unstabilised fabric. But the fabric was quite heavy, and the painted background also added a bit of weight and density, which is probably why I got away with it. All the same I’m going to have to be more careful in future!

The furry hare

8 December 2013MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approaches3 Comments

First, I’d like to say VERY many thanks to all the people who responded to the offer of a free design last week, and especially to Spanky, whose idea it was. It was fantastic to get in touch with you all, and I hope you will have good luck with the design. There will be a new free design up in the first week of January, but meanwhile the Mexican bird is still available. But if you've asked for the design and I haven't responded, PLEASE write again from a different e-mail address. I've had a lot of problems with bouncing messages

Now back to what I’ve been working on recently. In the past I’ve used my embellishing machine to add felted details directly to embroideries (see, for example, the cat posted on 15 November 2012.) But I’ve also been looking at the possibility of using felted fabric appliqueed onto designs. At the moment I’m working on a large panel that involves (among other things) a hare, and that seemed a good subject for felted applique

I started with a very loosely-woven muslin – almost a cheesecloth, really – and in order to stiffen it up and add a coloured background I painted it in streaks of different shades of brown before embellishing it with various bits of wool and yarn. I also added a little bit of gold roving, just for a subtle metallic glitter (although you can’t really see it on the scans)

Here is the embellished fabric right side up…

The "right" side of the embellished cloth

and here is a view from the underside.

The "wrong" side

Of course the underside looks a lot better for this purpose, so I stitched the hare using the embellished fabric “bottom-side up” as the applique. It worked pretty well. The result is a bit scruffy and hairy, but that just makes it look all the more like a furry animal. There is some overstitching on top of the applique (you can see it clearly on the back leg) and I’ll have to adjust that a little bit. But overall I’m quite happy with it

The furry hare with an embellished coat

A couple of new fabric ideas

25 April 2013MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approachesLeave a comment

Most of my designs involve applique, because appliqueed
fabric can add such rich dimensions to embroideries. These days I usually use
handpainted fabric for applique because most commercially available fabric
(with the possible exception of Fairy Frost Glitz) isn’t all that interesting.
But even hand-painted fabric isn’t appropriate for everything, so I’ve been
looking for new ways of producing fabric with various interesting finishes.

You can of course simply print fabric with motifs or
textures that you need for specific designs. I found some nice carving blocks
on the Internet, and cut them into printing blocks with various textures.

Printing blocks cut with different textures

These particular blocks are useful because they can suggest either feathers on birds or scales on fish. I do know that these
printed designs look a bit rough and crude, but that effect is deliberate. I
want to use the stamped fabric as part of an embroidery with a slightly
primitive, folky feel, and a slick, clean print wouldn’t be appropriate

Irregular printing goes well in a project with a folk-art feel

Second, I’ve been using the embellishing machine to produce
fabric with unusual surfaces. There are various ways this can be done, but I’ve
started by felting roving into cotton fabric. Roving is just combed fibre as
used by spinners and weavers, and can be bought in a wide variety of fibre and
colour. Here are two kinds of roving: wool dyed in shades of blue, and a
metallic gold fibre of some kind

Blue and gold roving

All you need to do is to felt the roving into a light cotton
fabric and you have a textile with very interesting colours and textures. Here
is some of the gold roving after felting, and also some kind of pink
fluorescent plastic fibre treated in the same way

Felted roving to use as an applique fabric

The gold fabric would work very well as the coat of an animal, and I have a
hare and a deer in mind that I can use this with. As for the pink fluorescent
material, it suggests some kind of fantasy animal. Or, done with red and yellow
fibre it would also suggest fire or sun

Another furry animal

15 November 2012MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approaches1 Comment

After the woolly sheep, I’ve been experimenting with using embellished (felted) wool in more embroideries. This one is based on a cat design I did a long time ago. I just stitched an outline of the shape, embroidered the ears, and then removed the fabric from the hoop and spent an hour or so felting in scraps of grey and brown wool (=American yarn) to make the coat, and added cream-coloured wool for the paws and tail tip. Here’s the design after embellishing.

Wool felted on to the embroidered outline

The black spots were put in to help to align the design with the camera after embellishing, as usually it’s difficult to see the outline of the original embroidery through the woolly coat. The spots are done in low density stitching so they’ll be easy to remove after the final stitching is complete.

Like many embellishers, I’ve noticed that the back of the embellished fabric is just as interesting as the front. It’s very different: a lot more blended and subtle, and I might just repeat this design some time and try embellishing from the back of the fabric.

Embellished cat seen from the back

But this time I kept to the usual method of using the front as the “right side”. I re-hooped the embellished fabric, scanned it with the camera attachment and adjusted the position on the machine with the help of the black dots. Then, with a layer of soluble stabiliser placed over the design, I stitched the final stages, which consisted mostly of adding texture to the coat. I also overstitched the paws and tail tip, and added an overstitched “mask” over the face area so that the details of eyes and mouth would stand out more clearly

The cat after the final stitching

This was a very interesting and instructive experiment. Perhaps the most important thing that I learned was that embellishing invariably stretches, compresses and generally distorts the fabric, so that with the best will in the world it is impossible to align the embellished fabric exactly with the original outline. That doesn’t matter with this design, because it’s pretty unstructured, and it doesn’t matter much if the final stitching is a little bit off. But I can imagine designs where it would be essential to align the embellished fabric exactly with the embroidered details, and that might be a problem.

Another thing I’ve learned is that it’s difficult to work with a design with fiddly details: felting scraps of wool into small, complicated areas can be a problem. The head of the embellisher isn’t all that small and if you aren’t careful you’ll find yourself felting the background fabric, which results in areas of torn and lacerated fabric all around your design.
So, the best kind of designs for this technique are those that are free and loose, and with the felting confined to large, simple shapes. It sounds like animal designs would be the right way to go. I have a drawing of a hare that I think would work well with this technique, so I’ll see what I can do

Blue birds in a blue bush

1 June 2009MiaEmbellishers and embroideryLeave a comment

Like a lot of other people, I recently got very excited about the potential design capabilities of embellishers, those machines that you can use to felt together yarns and threads and pieces of fabric, embedding them in a background fabric. There are a lot of ways these embellishers can be used and you can make some really spectacular textiles and designs with them

From a design point of view, using them is a lot like doing free-hand machine embroidery, because you let the design grow under your hands as you actually use the machine. You can of course plan what you want to do in advance, but generally it's a lot more free and easy than digitising a design

I love what you can do with an embellisher by itself, but I wanted to see what ways there were to combine it with digitised embroidery. So I bought a fleece shirt and found some wool (American translation: yarn) and fabric that toned well with the colour, and started felting shapes onto the shirt. I applied the wool (yarn) in the rough shape of branches of a bush, and then I added the leaves in various shades of blue. Then I digitised about 20 very small birds and scattered them around between the branches and the leaves in the same colours as the leaves, to suggest that the leaves were turning into birds and flying away. I got a lot of things wrong – for a start it was the first time I'd ever embroidered on fleece and I didn't use enough stabiliser, so parts of some of the birds are beginning to pull away from each other. Also I didn't always get the colours right on the birds, and the small size of the birds made it difficult to add much detail. But it didn't matter all that much – it was never a serious piece of work and it was fun to make and to wear