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
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