Sunday, 17 June 2012

“The crack cocaine of the craft world”

Kirstie Allsopp claims that machine embroidery is the crack cocaine of the craft world – hell I’d better give that a try…

I watched a very quick tutorial on YouTube to make sure that I understood the principles and knew what I needed to do to my machine in order to be able to attempt this apparently addictive craft. It turned out that all I needed to do was remove the sewing foot, set the tension to zero and retract the tracking pads that feed the material through the machine. I also needed to find my tapestry hoop and find something to embroider.

I decided to fill in the design on an IKEA pillowcase first of all and to use lots of the cottons that came with the sewing machine. I used a straight stitch on my slowest speed setting and experimented with different stitch lengths. By the time I’d filled in the first section I was hooked. Kirstie may have had a point.

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I was relatively pleased with this for a first ever attempt but I can’t claim that the back was neat and tidy.

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Next I decided to draw my own design on a square from Sarah’s old curtains. I went for a simple six petalled flower in two colours and this time I managed to keep the back relatively tidy too…

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With patience and perseverance I’m sure I’ll be able to do some free machine embroidery on the new banner for school birthday in September…

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