The Accidental Embroiderer

Something new - the woolly sheep

I know it’s ungrateful of me but I’m getting a bit bored with doing all these commissions. The problem is that either they’re not very ambitious ideas, or they’re based on old designs of mine that I’ve stitched hundreds of times. So I’m taking a break and trying out some new ideas. Ever since I tried the photo facility on the Innovis-i I’ve wanted to play around with it some more, and I’ve also wanted for some time to find a way of combining embellishing (needle-felting with a machine) with digitised embroidery. So here’s an idea that uses both these techniques.

I did a rough drawing of a sheep and digitised it quickly. It is intended to be made in three stages: the first embroidery stage, the embellishing, and the final embroidery stage.  Here’s the first embroidery stage

The first stage of the sheep

The head and legs are stitched first, and then a guide line is stitched, which will help with the placement of the felted wool at the next stage.

 

The sheep after the wool is felted on

 Then for the second stage the embroidery is removed from the hoop and strands of wool are felted on with the embellishing machine.  Then the wool is trimmed and the embroidery is re-hooped. At this stage you need the camera facility on the machine to be sure that the embroidery pattern is aligned with the embroidery in the hoop.  Finally the last steps of the embroidery are finished – the ear and the details of the woolly coat. It is VERY important to stitch these final details over a piece of water-soluble stabiliser to prevent any of the loops of wool from becoming caught up in the machine’s foot

 

The sheep after the final embroidered details are added

 

It's just a simple design but I'm pleased with the way it turned out. The techniques worked pretty well and should be applicable to other ideas besides sheep

The silver fish panel

The panel with the gilt and Mylar fish is done. The piecing was a bit fiddly, especially when the last few squares were added, but I ran a decorative stitch between the squares and although the whole panel doesn’t lie quite flat it’s not too bad, and it will look a lot better when it’s properly mounted.

The finished panel

The photo doesn't give much idea of the size - the panel is about 30 inches long (76 cm) and 12 inches high (30 cm), so it's really quite large, and with all that gold and silver you can't really ignore it when it's in the room.

The question remains as to whether it was worth all the work it took. It’s not entirely satisfactory, although I can’t say exactly why. It’s certainly very garish with all that metallic glitz, but as someone told me, “Sometimes you need a bit of garishness”. I’ll put it aside and look at it again in a few weeks, and maybe I’ll be able to put my finger on what’s wrong

 

A technical breakthrough!

I’m still working on the silver fish panel and have accidentally come up with a way to solve a lot of the technical problems that have been plaguing me. Following Cherri’s instructions I started sticking the Mylar to the fabric with tape to hold it steady before embroidering, when I suddenly had a brain wave and stuck a layer of Sellotape (or Scotch tape in American) to the back of the Mylar before stitching it on to the background fabric. This really improved things. It made the film a lot more robust and a lot easier to handle, and it stopped it rucking up and wrinkling when it was placed on the fabric. Best of all, the film was no longer cut through by overstitching

 Large areas of unsupported Mylar, but the stitching doesn't cut through it

 

So then it occurred to me that the same trick might work with the gold leaf, so I tried it and it was just as good. The taped foil was strong and easy to handle, and there was no need to glue it to the fabric. And best of all, there were no little flakes of metal drifting about

 

The top fish is made with tape-supported Mylar and the bottom one with tape-supported gold leaf

I’m now contemplating using double-sided tape, so that the film or the leaf can be stuck to the fabric and make things even easier

It’s true that the taped Mylar or leaf might not stand up well to washing. but that doesn’t matter for this project, because the fish panel will be mounted and not worn. Still, I’ll do a test piece and throw it in the washing machine to see what happens

 

Learning to live with Mylar

I’ve been working with the Mylar for several days now and have struggled from time to time. As a material to work with it’s a bit of a curate’s egg – there are some good things about it but also some really annoying things. Perhaps the most irritating is the fact that overstitching the Mylar can cut through the film, which can mean that large pieces of the stuff are cut out, as on this blue fish. There were supposed to be large silver panels on the back, between the narrow bands that remain, but they were neatly excised by the satin stitch overstitching

 

 Blue fish without all its Mylar

 

On the other hand, the large areas of Mylar on the bottom of these fish survived perfectly well, and I can’t see why it remained in place on these, but was cut out of the blue fish

 

 

Three fish that managed to hang on to all their Mylar

 

As I’ve been discovering, the safest thing to do is to overstitch the Mylar with lines of running stitch, which seem to hold it in place. That’s fine where it suits the design, but sometimes a design demands large areas of plain glittery finish, and then you’re stuck

 

 How to keep your Mylar - add a stitched grid

 

So as advice to anyone starting to digitise designs with Mylar, I’d suggest reducing the density of both running and satin-stitched areas. Even then, however, you can’t really get away with large areas of unsupported Mylar. Still, one of the secrets of good craftsmanship is to recognise the limitations of a medium, and give in to it gracefully, so I’d better learn to bow to the inevitable

 

Silver leaf vs. Mylar

Cherri’s sent me some samples of Mylar (from http://www.heirloomsbysharon.com/) and I’ve finally been able to try it out. I stitched the same fish with the Mylar as I had done before with the foil, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I had expected the foil to look a lot better, but in many ways the Mylar wins. For a start, because the Mylar isn’t glued down, it looks a bit “puffy”, which gives a nice three-dimensional look to the designs. The foil does looks a bit more genuinely metallic and less plasticky, but on the other hand the Mylar is a lot easier to use, and it doesn’t shed those worrying flakes. As I suspected, both materials have their advantages and disadvantages, and it's just a question of designing to make the most of whatever material you use

 

Fish embroidered with silver leaf

 

Fish embroidered with silvered Mylar film

 

Cherri's version of the Mylar fish in different colours

The only thing I really regret about giving up the foil is having to give up the fascinating colours and patterns it comes in. However the Mylar does come in some interesting colours too. I wonder if it would be possible to paint the Mylar with some very dilute acrylic paint to give a variegated appearance? I must give it a try

Meanwhile, with those technical problems sorted out, I think I can get back to the fish panel

 

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time...

I’ve very regretfully decided not to continue with the gilded fish project. It was going very well and I’d done several nice silver and gold fish. But the problem was that after the gilding was applied to the fish, the edges of the foil began to break up into tiny metallic flakes. This didn’t affect the appearance of the fish, and at first it was just a nuisance, as I began to find little metallic flakes all over the house. But then I began to wonder if the little bits of foil might find their way into my machine, and that was a worrying thought. They were only tiny flakes, but all the same you don’t want bits of metal, no matter how small, getting caught up in the delicate mechanism of these machines

So I’ve had to call a halt to the project. However Cherri is sending me some samples of Mylar, which might be a substitute for the metallic gilt. I haven’t a clue what Mylar is, although I think it's a plastic film of some kind, and I haven’t been able to find a UK supplier. It won't be the same as gilt, so the project won’t look the same. However it may be different in a good way - we’ll just have to see

 Meanwhile, here’s the way the gilded fish developed.

 

First, the fins are stitched and the body of the fish is appliqueed onto a background fabric

 

 

Second, the foil is glued onto the body of the fish

And third, the finishing details are added

But look at all those little gold flakes round the finished stitchout. They were broken off the loose edges of the foil by the vibration of the embroidery machine. Could those maybe end up in the mechanism of the machine? I don’t want to take the chance

 

A few new approaches

In the past week, several different ideas have come together to contribute to some new designs. In the first place, Frances Crawford (who runs our painting class) has drawn our attention to Pictish art. There are many carved Pictish stones in this part of Scotland and although their designs aren’t as well known as the more elaborate classical Celtic work, I love the simple, natural style of the Pictish animals and birds.

Second, we’ve also been discussing ways to use transferred images in painting, and I thought that transfers could also be used as backgrounds to embroideries

Third, I’ve been following through the idea of using metallic foil in embroidery, and the Pictish designs seemed natural subjects for gilding

 My first attempt at using metallic foil was encouraging (see last week’s blog entry) but I think I was lucky in choosing a small design with a lot of overstitching. More recently I’ve found that there are technical problems in applying foil to large areas of fabric. However with a little experimentation I’ve got to grips with the technique and have now been able to use quite large areas of foil in embroideries

 So here are two Pictish animals – a deer and a goose -  embellished with metallic foil. The background to the deer is transferred from a computer print-out, but the goose is just stitched onto plain fabric

 A deer, taken from a Pictish stone carving, stitched onto a transferred background and embellished with silver leaf

 

A Pictish goose, with gold leaf on the head and copper leaf on the back and wings. The metallic leaf is applied first, and the embroidered detail on the wings is stitched on top of the metallic foil

A glittering new idea

I’m really excited about a new technique I'm working with at the moment. At a painting workshop I went to a few months ago, I saw some paintings embellished with gold leaf. The effect was spectacular, and made quite ordinary paintings look very exciting. I’ve been thinking about trying the same thing with embroidery, and the other day I finally got round to ordering some gold, silver, copper and multi-coloured leaf from a supplier. (If anyone wants to try the same thing, I got the materials from http://www.stonehouses.co.uk/. They have a very good selection of metallic foils at quite reasonable prices, and their service is excellent)

For the first trial I appliqueed a simple fish and then glued some metallic foil to the fabric with PVA glue. I then embroidered details over the foil. I had expected the foil to break up under the embroidery, but it was surprisingly robust - once the glue had dried I couldn’t even scrape the leaf off the fabric with a blade. True, there was one place where the foil did flake a bit, but that was because I hadn’t applied the glue evenly. In fact, the whole thing looks so sturdy that it might even be washable in a gentle hand-wash.  OK, I know the colours on the fish are all wrong, but this was just a first trial, after all.

The colours may be wrong but the idea is exciting

 

At the moment I’m spending most of my time devising designs which will make full and best use of this interesting new technique, so you can expect more of the same thing in the next couple of months

Finished goat

And here is the optical goat panel, stitched out and stitched together. I’m reasonably happy with it. The main point of the panel is to intrigue the eye, and make it work to see both the large image of the goat, and the small intricate designs from which it’s made up, and I think it does this. I also think it works better than the optical bird, partly because the individual squares are larger and so it’s possible to make each small design more interesting in itself. And I think the painted fabric helps give the squares more impact. The colours on this photo are a lot paler than the original but it gives the general idea

 

 The finished optical goat panel (approximately 17 x 20 inches)

 

But I’m not sure where this idea is going. It’s a little like the zentangle designs – there’s only so much you can do with the general concept, and after a while it all begins to look much the same. I wonder if irregular shapes would give a different effect from squares…

A patchwork fish

A long time ago I played around with the idea of adapting a pieced crazy-quilt effect to designs of animals and plants, and I tried the idea out on a couple of a couple of embroidered birds (10 January 2011). Neither of them worked very well so I set aside the idea for a while. However I’ve come back to it recently and have done a fish which I think is a big improvement on my first efforts. I’ve learned that for this effect to work you have to draw the design to suit the decorative stitching, and not just add the stitching afterwards in a “where-can-I-put-this-decorative-stitching” kind of way. Well, of course that should be obvious and I should have seen it from the beginning!

A  A patchwork fish with decorative crazy-quilt stitching

I still want to use this method to add interest to flamboyant Jacobean flowers but it’s been surprisingly difficult to draw florals where this kind of stitching can be used. But I’ll keep at it, because if I can work out how to use these stitches in floral designs they should be very effective