I am wishing all my readers the happiest of holidays. May it be warm and full of love and peace. I will be picking up my blog in January with my 2021 focus which will have the primary goal of sharing the joy and adventure of creating fabric art, and I will be providing a range of video classes and video tidbits throughout the year. Thank you for reading my blog. I am looking for a subscribe app that I can put on the blog as a button and be safe and secure for us. Blessings on you all.
I hand stitched this little crewel scene using wool threads years ago. It has a special meaning for me because I stitched it during my frequent visits with my mother in the months that lead up to her death in 1998. My youngest son took it and had it framed in a museum quality acid free framing to protect it.
I love both hand and machine stitched fabric art. I do most, or nearly all my stitching by machine now, but that was not always the case. I have done some rather beautiful, even if I do say so myself, embroidery, cross stitching, and crewel work by hand. I used to d0 a lot of hand stitching when I made wedding dresses and couture tailored garments decades ago. But I am now in my 70s and my hands get really tired in short order when I am doing hand stitching.
Besides that, I have wonderful Berninas that can help me do some remarkable things and I love exploring all they can do. It seems to me possible to not only get an exquisite handmade look for some fabric art using my machines, but also to do some equally exquisite stitching that is clearly done by machine.
“Canterbury Silk”. This quilt won several ribbons in national competitions. All the stitching in this quilt is by machine.
I am not sure how much faster it is to do the stitching by machine, though I am sure it is a little bit. This is especially the case when I am trying to embellish with specialty threads and decorative stitching. To do that well, I often need to stitch slowly. I imagine that there are some of you who can stitch more rapidly with super results, but I totally enjoy the slow stitching around appliques, for instance, or embellishing parts of an especially nice quilted wall art piece. It is as enjoyable to me as the hand stitching ever was.
Kanazawa Memories, Completed August 2015
Sashiko designs machine stitched with 12 weight Sulky cotton on to Peppered Cottons. Appliqued with Monopoly. I love how the Sashiko came out on this piece.
High end machine work requires planning, testing, practice, and a fair amount of knowledge, but it is sometimes thought to be less artistic 0r less appreciated somehow than hand done work. While I love hand work, I disagree with this point of view. I think both are important and can be exquisite and admired as something special. I also think it is wonderful what can be accomplished by machine.
Sew happy everyone! Have a delightful Merry Christmas!
Detail from “Noel”.
Hi everyone. Well, I completed the update on my website and am reasonably happy with it. I did not yet put the store in operation because I still am working on the downloadables I am planning to sell there. My goodness I have been busy!
A digital design I created last year. It seems like winter to me with snowflakes that look like butterflies…LOL.
I have been having fun though. This week I am embellishing my wool applique by machine sampler with decorative stitches using 12 weight Aurifil wool blend thread. I have been really enjoying figuring out which stitches to use on each applique and how to set them.
Sampler one part one. Here we have the simple shapes of the sampler in place, ready to begin the embellishment/embroidery.
Since I used Steam-a-Seam 2 fusible for the appliques, and they are felted wool going on to Melton boiled wool background using wool thread, there is a lot of fluff! So the fluff stuck to the needle and filled the bobbin area. I just cleaned out the bobbin when my machine complained about the bobbin and it was just fine. But I had just gotten a package of Schmetz super non stick 90/14 needles. Now one needs that size needle for 12 weight threads, and I was using a Superior top stitch, which is a fine needle that I use for most of my work, but the fluff from all this wool was continuously climbing up the needle and had become problematic. So I tried the non-stick needle and was astonished at how the fluff on the needle just went away! The stitching went forward with no further problems other than stopping every now and then to clean out the bobbin area, which isn’t very hard to do. My bobbin sensor lets me know when it cannot “see” anymore. LOL
Truly I encourage you all to try some embellished applique by machine. Realize it isn’t very fast, in fact it is kind of slow when properly done, but it is beautifully satisfying to do and just plain fun! So keep it small for your first projects! In another week or maybe a little more, I will have the first of my embellished wool applique by machine videos up and running. I will tell and show you what I have learned about this technique. I invite you to join me in making a sampler of your own. I know you will enjoy it.
Next week I will post a list of supplies for the project with links of where you can get them and I will also put a pdf downloadable handout here for you to use too. This class and downloads are free. I do, however, have plans for presenting many other techniques and projects by video where the project workbooks and patterns will be available for sale on my new website shop. I hope to keep the videos free, but we will see how that goes. Keeping the videos free will depend on how many subscribers I get to my channel and how many people buy the downloadales.
Sew happy everyone! I hope you are enjoying a Happy Hanukkah and Christmas season. It’s my favorite time of the year. Blessings everyone!
This is my 300th blog post here! Sew I thought it was a good time to talk about several things planned for the near future related to my little micro business.
I am rebuilding my website and will be adding a little shopping cart that I am planning to use just for downloadable files, such as workbooks, patterns, and other downloadable aids for sewing and quilting. I am almost done with the new website and hope to introduce it to you very soon. The shop will be added a little later.
Now the main website is different from my blog, just in case you are wondering. This blog will remain the same at least for some months. Eventually, I am hoping to move this over to the blog space that comes with my website upgrade, but I don’t want to lose my older blogs. If you haven’t done so for a while or ever, scroll back through my blogs. You have to do it by the month by going to the archives box and selecting the month. But you will find there are a lot of things you may find helpful in my blog archives.
Perhaps I will instead of moving the blogs, pull the more useful information from them and put them into a book or books with a bit of editing, and then start a totally new blog. What do you think? I would love to have your input on how to handle this.
In the meanwhile, I am still working on getting my videos going on YouTube. The first set of three or four videos on Wool Applique by Machine are nearly done and will be posted by the end of December. I have a long list of video subjects I am planning on developing. For this first set, there will be free handouts for download from here, but for the next of them there will be a mix of workbooks and patterns for a small cost from my main website shop I am setting up, and the occasional free downloads will still be from this blog.
Of course, all of this is centered around my continued quilted fabric art work (multi-use work..LOL). Once I get over the hump of setting all of this up, and I am almost there, then I will be able to go back to mostly sewing and quilting and designing, but just using a lot of it for my videos. It has been a bit of a bear getting it all set up, but I have had a great deal of help from my sons.
So 2021 looks to be really exciting for me and my studio, and I hope for all of my readers. Here is a little list of some of the subjects I am thinking about for the first half of 2021.
I don’t really know what I will do in what order. Part of the fun for me is moving through the things I know that I want to share by using the projects I want to work on myself. I don’t have deadlines, and I don’t plan on setting them, but I will let you know when they are ready to do.
Sew happy everyone!