Here’s another of the pieces I worked on during our demonstration at Festival of Quilts 2022 where we showed a display of our work for the launch of the new Madeira thread, Sensa Green.
You can see the other one in my previous post here. To recap, I had the privilege of working on this beautiful Husqvarna Viking Designer Ruby kindly loaned to us for the show by our friends at HV. It’s a machine with an embroidery unit meaning you can pop your work in the hoop and use digital stitch. I’d prepared some designs ahead of the show using MySewnet.com software.
This piece is about 20″ (50cm) square and is a piece of cotton that I’ve digitally printed with an image of one of my paintings.
First I laid down a background of quilting with a linear fill design that looks like it’s freehand, but it’s digitally stitched in the hoop. The printed design had polka dots so that seemed like a good place to start with the more decorative stitching. I digitised rows of satin stitched circles and also some much larger circles. I stitched the smaller ones first changing the thread colour from orange to red, and then placed some of the larger circles over the top.
Each of these layers is very simple, but when you combine them you quickly start to achieve quite a rich surface.
In the lower blue and black section of the fabric there was some patterning inspired by lace. I’ve done lots of work with lace as a reference because my ancestors were lacemakers. In my stitch design library I had some designs that aren’t lace but have the feel of it. I chose one and stitched it out partially over on the right hand side.
There’s still a bit of work to finish off on this one, but the layers of different stitch designs is working quite nicely so far. Hopefully it’s a nice example of how different stitch designs can be combined together in a single piece.
