Back to the Drawing Board!

My experiment from the previous post needs more work!!! A lot more work!!!

Here's the stitching on a Styrofoam ball. I should have covered the ball with foil as this piece stuck to it and I had the dickens of a time getting it off. Not to mention that a lot of the glue from the water soluble stabilizer (below) did not dissolve. In my wisdom, I decided to add the Ultra Solvy to the Aqua Magic sheet already in the hoop. Not a good idea.

Here's the first one! What a disaster!! But, not one to give up, I did a second one using same thread colour.

This one was pinned onto a foil covered ball. This time, it came off without any difficulty.

However, too much of the stabilizer was rinsed off. Only the threads going around the top are keeping it in shape.

 More of the Aqua Magic Stabilizer was dissolved in a small amount of water to form a paste.

The paste still didn't stiffen it enough to stay in shape. Next time I will use fabric stiffener. And I will do a lot more stitching as the lines I did were fragile. I was in a hurry to see the result. I should know better after all the years I've been doing things like this.

trimmed!

Next time I'll do better ( SMILE )!!!! And, I'm going to use a slightly smaller Styrofoam ball.

Enjoy

Having Fun!!

Hello February!!!

Today I decided to play around with some ideas using free motion stitching. I sketched a design onto paper and transferred it to water soluble stabilizer. It was hooped and stitched using variegated thread.
 

That's as far as I got today. Next step tomorrow. I'll keep you posted whether it turns out or not. Remember - experiments don't always turn out perfectly the first time.

Enjoy!

Embroidered Flowers and Fibre Art Pendants

I had a request from The Rooms Gift Shop for Fibre Art Pendants with flowers embroidered on them. Have a look! The daisy petals are embroidered on water soluble interfacing (in this case Aqua Magic), and then spritzed with water. When the flowers dry, the glue in the Aqua Magic hardens them so they can be stitched in place. This gives a 3-D effect to the pendant.

Tip of The Day . . . Learned The Hard Way!!

I set my embroidery machine going early this morning as I needed more Polar Bear Shimmers for a June exhibit. Things went well for the first two sets (takes 40 minutes to stitch up a set). On the third set I had a lot of thread breaks and then the needle started to gum up. I wasn't using anything different to suddenly make the needle sticky. Of course, when the needle is sticky, it will not pick up the bobbin thread. So I did a cleaning of the machine and put in a new needle. I figured this would do the trick. No, it did not. Then I had the bright idea of using needle # 2. That did not work either - same thread difficulty. I noticed that the problem was is a certain section of the hoop. I had used Aqua Magic water soluble stabilizer to hold my base fabric and there was a factory join near one end. I picked at this. A sticky glue was holding the joined parts together. Problem solved! But it was a costly problem, time wise for me as I'm trying to get my textile piece completed by tomorrow at the latest.


Tip: cut off any factory joins when using a stabilizer such as Aqua Magic!!
I use this stabilizer a lot. It's great to embroider on either from the machine or by hand. When the stabilizer is washed away, you have some interesting embroidery to add to a piece. Check out stabilizer descriptions & uses.