Month: April 2025

Taking your Lumps: What to Do When It Won’t Lie Flat

| ellenanneeddy

Everyone who tries solid free motion embroidery is bound to ask, “Why is it all puckered up?” and right after that, “What can I do about it?”

This is like the part of Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence does a trick with a match, his friend tries it too, drops the match. screaming, “It hurts. What’s the trick?” Laurence answers, “The trick is not to care that it hurts.”

Zigzag embroidery will always pucker up. It’s the nature of the zigzag stitch. It pulls in one direction only., so it’s not an even distortion. It will shrink only in the direction of the width of the stitch, every time.

How do I control distortion?

There are things you can do that help

  • . Use a stabilizer underneath. I use a sandwich of felt, stitch and tear, totally stable and hand dyed cotton
  • Use a hoop.
  • Use a smaller stitch.
  • Do it on a separate stabilizer sandwich.
  • All of that helps.

It’s still going to pucker up. That much thread placed unevenly in your fabric will pucker.. Sorry. So this is what you do when all that good planning and preparation doesn’t work.

I knew when I drew this octopus in a shell it was going to distort. Distortion happens when you have different amounts of stitching in the same piece. The shell, the tenacle and the octopus’s body are all stitched at different density with different kinds of threads. That will always distort. Also things in a circle tend to pull together to distort as well. I embroidered this knowing it was going to do this.

What Can I do to Stop it while I’m working

  • Keep going. Fill in all of it. Some of it will pull in as you stitch. Even if it doesn’t flatten out enough, you’ll need it stitched.
  • Hold your piece flat with your fingers while you’re stitching. You can pull the surface flat with your fingers spread apart on the piece. I recommend you do this in a hoop. Be careful. You want to hold it down, but don’t get your fingers under the needle.
  • Iron the piece from the back with heavy steam.

What happens if it’s still lumpy?

Steam it as best as you can.

If that doesn’t work, it’s time for surgery.

Now, before you hyperventilate, think of this. I sewed it. I cut it, I sewed it back together. The trick is to cut in on the lines of the pattern. I cut along the line of the tenacle. I’ll oversew it with the outlining.

Why do this? I hate to be limited. I want to do my images as I see them. If they need to be fixed afterwards, so be it. Cutting it to release the tension and sewing it back together lets me create images I couldn’t do any other way.

I think it needs kelp, 2 tentacles from another octopus, and jelly fish. Not sorry about this at all.

Wisteria Blossoms

| ellenanneeddy

Sometimes hand-dye designs your quilt for you.

I had embroidered a radiated spoonbill landing, and I needed a background for her. This purply brown piece seemed nicely swampy and I loved the range of purple running in an arc through it. It looked like a bower of wisteria, so that’s what I went through.

I’ve done wisteria before. I sometimes feel I can smell them in the studio as I stitch on them

I wanted particularly soft glowing wisteria for this very dark swamp. These were done mostly from hand-painted lace, stitched with poly neon.

And small bright birds sitting in them.

On thing leads to another. The bird leads to the swamp background. The swamp leads to a wisteria bower. And the wisteria need bright little birds.

Wisteria, like roses, sunflowers, and hollyhocks, are part of the garden of my dreams. I can’t help but slip them in wherever their fragrance and illumination are needed.

The next step is to fit everything in together with a pond at the bottom, birds, and small fish.

On the other side of the studio, we have 2 torn-up 930 Berninas. Don has been heroically deciding which will live and which will be a parts machine. I’m working on the only functional embroidery machine, an 807 Bernina from around 1970. It’s a tiny machine, originally for classroom. We’re waiting for the resurrection, which sometimes spreads more slowly than you would like. It means I’m not able to work the 2 large quilts I have laid out at the moment. So….

An ocean floor, several external tenacles lots of jellyfish, I think. On a much smaller piece of fabric.

fluffy: Making Feathers with the Long and Short Stitch

| ellenanneeddy

This is what I did this week. She’s a secretary bird.

I have to thank John Muir Laws book Law’s Guide to Drawing Birds for its descriptions and information about different kinds of feathers. I’ve been pleased with my pinions, tails and wing feathers for some while, although I wanted them to be less stripey.

I like these pinions. But even with overstitching, they look a bit stripey to me. I’ve been working at overcoming that look by more irregular uneven stitching on the feathers and overstitching.

Body feathers are different. They’re fluffy. They aren’t a part of the flight system. Instead, they are a body cover.

The Long-Short Stitch

I went back to an old embroidery stitch pattern that gave me exactly what I needed, The long short stitch is made by moving your hands unevenly from side to side with your stitching. I made the scallops I would have made for breast feathers, but ragged and without outline so they blend into each other.

Long-short stitch

  • Fills in beautifully.
  • Doesn’t need an outline.
  • Doesn’t need to completely cover the fabric to be effective.
  • Is easy and forgiving.
  • Utilizes a simple zigzag stitch moved from side to side.
  • Progresses nicely. You can add multiple colors of stitchery to build shadow and form without adding a hard line.

The long short stitch in freemotion embroidery has nothing to do with a machine stitch set on your machine. It’s all in how you move your fabric through the needle.

The piece shades from dark underneath to brighter up the neck. But because there’s no internal outline, it looks like fluffy feathers. It’s a bit tougher because we’re shading to white. It needs to look white without actually being a white hot spotlight.

I’m planning this background and sun. Not sure what happens after that. Heavy grasses, I think.

For more information about the long-short stitch check out The Long and the Short of It.

Bird Feet: The difference in the Details

| ellenanneeddy

One of the reasons I like working larger is that I get to play with the details. Smaller images sometimes only need a line of stitching to define things. Larger images allow me to play with color and texture. And the space to make the details count.

There are a couple of defining factors. Are the legs and feet segmented? A solid line of black stitching defines that.

These feet were stitched with progressive colors in garnet stitch, small circles intertwined together.

Does the stitching flow into itself? These have simpler feet and legs with segments.

Does it have patterned stitching? These were stitched in u-shaped scales.

Garnet stitch textures these feet with quieter tones.

Of course, the angle of the legs creates the movement of the bird.

And you can cheat by putting the feet in water.

Different textures, different treatments make the kind of details that define the piece.