What can you do with a free-motion zigzag stitch? Draw, outline, fill in, thread painting, sign your name, and more.
Stitch Vocabulary: Zigzag Stitch
technique
Physical techniques used in making a quilt
Translucence: Making Stitchery Look Transparent
I’ve been rethinking how I usually make my dragonflies for my quilt Great Blue. I picked up some new research books and I was struck how very transparent and translucent their wings were. How could I do that?
Dissolvable stabilizer really is transparent and has that look. But it’s made to dissolve if it gets wet. I can’t promise that won’t ever happen. Humidity itself might dissolve the stabilizer.
I’m pretty sure Saran Wrap would tear. Sure enough not to try it.
I I have used organza or lace. It’s a neat look and I like it. But I wanted a more integrated stitched effect. I wanted them to appear to be see-through.
So I thought about it in terms of thread choices. I love Madeira Supertwist. It’s my go-to metallic thread. There are several color ranges. One range is of solid metallic colors. But one of the color ranges is opalescent and crystal. It’s translucent in itself. So I used it in the transparent part of the wings, and the metallic parts in the exoskeleton of the dragonflies.
It doesn’t look transparent exactly. It looks reflective, like glass or water. Not quite what I had in mind, but I think it does the job.
Here’s the difference. This bug is out of solid metallic thread. It makes a bolder statement, more like an exoskeleton than like see-through wings.
All stitchery is a gigo proposition. Good things in, Good things out. When you use excellent threads and get excellent although sometimes unexpected results. I’m going to try these crystalline threads in other ways where I want a translucent look.
Stitch Vocabulary: Straight Stitch
In the next weeks, I intend to preview my new Stitch Vocabulary Book. It’s a classroom book to go with the Stitch Vocabulary Book Class. It’s a series of exercises to help you build up your free-motion skills. It’s also a sewn and bound record of your experimenting. The first page explores straight stitch.
A word about where this book is in production. I’m working on it in a daily way, and I’m sharing that with you. It is a work in process. If you are worried about my spelling, rest assured that I have people who help me with that. But if something doesn’t make sense or isn’t helpful, I really need to know.
I’m having trouble with the photos. But I promised to show you as I’m working. So please be patient. Right now I’m working on content.
This book is to go with a class at Gems of the Prairie Quilt Guild, May 3rd and 4th. They are currently sighing people up for class.
So here are pages from the introduction and the first exercise on Straight Stitch.
Introduction
Straight Stitch
Next week I’ll show you the exercise for Zigzag stitching. I’ve created a page on my site for more information, patterns and handouts for the Stitch Vocabulary Book.
Turning Over a New Leaf
We’ve talked about ways to make leaves more real. Leaves are wonderful shapes in themselves, but because they bend and fold and move, they add movement to your piece.
I’ve been working on a fish quilt that I wanted to frame roughly in kelp leaves, and it seemed like a good study on making leaves fold. Kelp is a water plant that bends completely to the movement of the water. But it has a definite back and front. We’re going to experiment with making the leaves fold for this quilt. Here we have just raw cut leaves.
I can see some purples in this as shadows, perhaps, but what I really want my thread color to do is to define the front and the back of the leaves. I intend to stitch the edges pretty heavily, so I’m going to do the leaves separately. I’ve cut leaves freehand from several scraps of green and glued them to felt with Steak a Seam 2. On the back, I have Stitch and Tear which is a crisp tear-away non-woven interfacing. So my embroidery sandwich is my hand dye, Steam a Seam 2, and Stitch and Tear.
I took a piece of the release paper from the Steam a Seam 2 leaf cuts and have folded it in different ways so you can see how that affects the leaf. The front side edges will have heavy crenellation on them. The back sides will be smooth where the folds are.
My thread zones are back and front sides. The front needs to be bright/dark /intense colors. The back needs to be muddy, greyed, soft colors.
It seems like the fabric should define the leaves completely, but I’ve found that’s never really so. What defines much of the leaf color is the thread. If the thread is purple it’s at least a purplish leaf. Sometimes that’s the way to go.
stitching the leaves
Here’s a video showing the crenelated stitched edges.
The leaves fold in the water. On the front side, their edges are crinkled and bright. The edges on the back sides are smooth and greyed out. once they’re applied to the quilt I can take sheers and lace and overlay them with water so they look wet.
Here are some of my separate leaves, made to fold in the water.
I’m not so sure about this layout. I think I need to leave it on the wall for a while and see if I have the placement right. I may have overdone. But since nothing is stitched down, nothing is written in stone. I’ll see how it looks in the morning.
To explore more ways to make leaves check out my previous blog post, Over and Under
FS2/20: The Thread That Looks Like Beading
Most of my work centers around threads, so I fuss about them quite a bit. Most threads divide into their components: metallic, rayon, cotton, and polyester. Fs 2/20 is a bit different. It has a black core the metallics are wrapped around and when it’s used in zigzag embroidery looks like little beads.
These lizards were stitched as bobbin work, out of FS 2/20. The eyes are sliver.
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In contrast, these butterflies were all out of Supertwist Madiera metallic, with FS 2/20 bodies. Again, shiny Sliver eyes.
Why does all that matter? Because those three kinds of thread offer a totally separate look that makes the objects embroidered in them automatically different from each other. Your eye sorts for shiny first. That means that first, it sees the shiny eyes, then the supertwist butterflies, and finally the rich beaded looking lizards. Now, how cool is that?
FS 2/20 is not an easy thread to find. To my knowledge, you need to get it from Madeira. But I do think it’s one of the most beautiful threads I know of. They also have Poly Neon and Supertwist and a bevy of embroidery stabilizers.
For more information about using different kinds of thread, check out Shimmer: Defining the Background.
Wake It Up! Sparking Color With Overstitching
I love creating color with thread. The threads available make an endless choice of colors. You’re eye blends the bits f thread that peek out from their layers. It makes colors that are rich, dense, and complicated. What’s not to love?
But sometimes it gets too monochromatic. I was working on this heron and I wanted some fish companions for him.
When I picked out my threads for these, I wanted them red to stand out from all that grey in the heron. Red is funny. Like every color, it can lean either to the sun or the shade. A balanced red would use threads of both tempuratures. I used both kinds, a little purple and teal for shaders. And I threw in a green just to spark it.
By the time I got to the green, the whole mass was bland. Pretty. Stripy. Bland. I put in the green and it just woke up. Then more reds and finally oranges.
The green stitching on top is garnet stitch, in small circles. It changed everything!
Yellow overstitching creates a swirl on the fish face that helps round the face. Overstitching adds a color layer, but it also breaks through that bland smooth color.
It helps, of course that the yellow complements the purple, and the green complements the reds. But the textural elements also wake up the fish and feed our eyes.
Cut Off the Same Cloth: Elements that Work for More than One Quilt
Years ago someone asked me how many mushrooms go in a quiche. I asked back, “How many mushrooms do you have?”
I don’t make copies of things. I do make variations, and I find it useful to rethink some things I’ve done before, or more importantly tried to do before. I might get lucky. You never know.
But there are some things I know I can always use. There are never enough dragonflies, daisies, frogs, or mushrooms. They make an excellent point of interest for a visual path through a piece. And every so often I make batches of them.
The last two quilts had lots of frog and mushroom action. But they are such different pieces. Why did that work? Why do the same color elements work in two really different color backgrounds?
I’ve thought about it a bit and have decided that bright is a color all of its own. Green Heron Hunting features a bright fall-red sky, a stream, and some rocks. High Rise Living is a soft-colored background as a garden with lobster claw plants dangling in the breeze. The backgrounds couldn’t be different. But both backgrounds are a strong contrast to the mushrooms and frogs. High Rise Living is almost pastel. Green Heron Hunting is a bit somber. Both of them are high-contrast against the backgrounds
Batching regular elements has changed my work a lot. I find I can do larger elements with much less distortion. The downside is they need to be stitched down afterward. The mushrooms get stitched down with the most prevalent color on the edge. The frogs and other elements usually get stitched down with black. I don’t always like the heavier black borders, but it eliminates a lot of pucker and distortion.
So I continue to make batches of the elements I know I’ll use again and again, Contrast, any contrast makes elements work together. And there’s always room for one more frog.
Shimmer: Defining the Background
I have two quilts I’m finishing right now that you’ve been watching me work on. The threads I choose make all the difference in their background effects. Shinier threads will create a shimmer, a wet or wild area. Less shiny threads are more indicative of air or ground. I’m treating them with different threads and patterns to create a specific effect in each case.
For a very wet look, I’ll use Sliver and other flat threads. These really shine across the surface. I prefer them for either starry nights or for water.
The other thread I’m using is Madeira’s bug body thread, FS2/20. This amazing thread has a black core that gives it a very different texture. Zigzagged it does look like bugs. As a stipple it has a sharp look without the intense shine.
I consider both these threads incredibly beautiful and essential. But I use them very differently. Because they create an incredibly different texture. Why is that important? The texture defines the area for our eyes. Shiny thread will create that wet feeling. A sharp undefined metallic does excellent air or dirt, all defined in our thread choices, with no more work to it than that.
Green Heron Hunting is set with water, air, leaf, and ground elements. The air and the ground are very similar. I don’t want a soft look. It’s fall, so I want it to be crisp and textured. So I chose Sliver for my stream. But the ground area with the frogs and the leaf tree tops are stippled zigzag with the FS2/20. There’s a glint of metallic, but it’s different from the high sheen of the water and the eye separates them immediately.
For the air, I chose a driving straight stipple pattern to suggest wind. But I put in a repetitive garnet stitch in it to make it look more driven.
For Fishy Business, the background is all water. So I used Sliver-type threads exclusively. The very shimmery background contrasts highly with the completely poly-embroidered fish. They both shine, but in very different ways.
Your thread choices and stipple patterns define the background. Contrast is the key. If your background and images contrast each other, they will stay visually separate, and help your eye to see the separation.
If you’d like more information on stippling and threads, check out. Skimming the Surface: Bobbin Work as Stippling.
Leafmeal Lie: Making snippet scrap Leaves
I don’t follow trends well. If it interests me it interests me. If it doesn’t, it’s background noise. So the snippet thing just went right past me. It’s an interesting technique, but it didn’t work with what I was doing.
So I was working on Green Heron Hunting and I needed to do something different with the leaves. I’ve often used green sheers with stitching to create folliage.
But I wanted fall leaves. Small fall leaves. I didn’t want them to be detailed. Just bits of color. So for this, the snippet thing made sense. I sat down with a pile of hand dyed scraps, and cut some bits. I cut a cloud shape of Steam a Seam 2. I arranged the bits on to the Steam a Seam 2 backing and pressed them on high heat with a non-stick pressing cloth.
The trick with a pile of snippes is stitching them down without them getting caught in the darning foot or having them go all over. I’ve seen snippets done with tulle over them to control the bits. Personally, I don’t like the look. I can always see the tulle. It looks either too dark or too light and it spoils the effect for me. So i decided to stitch them down with a top layer of dissolvable stabilizer, to keep things from getting tangled.
Dissolvable stabilizers have been around for a while. They are a film made from cornstarch and dissolve in water. They have a lot of commercial uses for computerized embroidery, but they also work well for free-motion embroidery. I don’t know that they stabilize so much as they keep the machine feet from getting tangled in the thread and bits of fabric. Originally they showed up in the 80s as Brama Bags, a dissolvable laundry bag for hospitals, where they were concerned about contagion from people’s laundry. It’s only gotten better since then. There are lots of different brands. The difference is in how thick the film is and how easily it dissolves. I like Aqua Film, which is now called StitcH2O, by OESD. But there are also Solvey, and Badgemaster and new ones come out all the time. What you are looking for is a film that’s steady enough to stitch over without being too thick. Thick ones take forever to dissolve.
That made a tree top I could iron onto the piece itself. But I never trust glue. It sometimes just comes loose. So it needs to be stitched over. And all those little bits of fabric, even glued, are going to go everywhere. So this is where I used my Aqua Film. I pinned over a sheet of the film, and stitched it with a zigzag stitch and a metallic green/brown Metallic thread called FS2-20.
After all that stitching, I trimmed away any extra stabilizer.
I put it up on my photo wall, got out a spray bottle, and spritzed the stabilizer. It’s not instant. You need to get it really wet. But it dissolves. I put a fan on the piece and it was dry the next day. The color darkened a bit, but I’m still happy with the result.
So these trees work for me. The frogs and heron are so busy, there needed to be similar excitement going on up top.
I’ve also used dissolvable topping film for a technique I call globbing, where you stitch down a glob of thread onto a quilt. Just put the thread where you want it, pin the stabilizer on top, and stitch in circles until it’s significantly attached. They work well for stitching over delicate things like Angelina Fiber, where, again your pressure foot is likely to get caught. You can read about it in Another Fine Mess: Globbing, What’s on Your Floor