FME Workshop

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What a great day I had yesterday! As planned I toddled off to Peterborough to take a Free Machine Embroidery Workshop with Gina at Art & Stitch. Angela who owns Art & Stitch very kindly sent her DH to pick me up at the station as I travelled down by train and, blissfully, the studio is air-conditioned so we were wonderfully cool all day inspite of the raging (for the UK) temperatures outside.
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Since a lot of the class were relative novices Gina started us off very simply with some genreal free machining of basic patterns. Just remember to relax your shoulders and breathe!
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Sorry, I used a pale-ish thread so it doesn't show up too well here but I did feel that I was learning a bit more about controlling the speed of the machine and the movement of the cloth under the needle. It's surprising how long it takes to do these small samples when you're not used to this activity.
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Our next task was to take a couple of fresh leaves (Gina had made a foray into the undergrowth to pick some ivy for us) and layer them - base fabric, bondaweb film (no backing paper), leaves, bondaweb film and a sheer. After we had ironed to seal the bondaweb the fabric was laid onto a piece of calico and free machined. We used granite stitch ( tiny overlapping circles, or spiky triangles most of the time in my case) in the spaces around the leaves and stitched round the edge and up the leaf veins in straight stitch. Unfortunately my machine decided it was going to have a few grumps so I didn't get this finished but I'll come back to this piece in a minute cos I've loaded the pics out of sequence.

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The next task was to take soluble fabric (Avalon in my case), lay it across your hoop, cut snippets of fabrics on top and cover with a top layer of soluble. The sandwich was then hooped and free machined in any pattern you wish. You could also put a sheer over the snippets if you wished. I was decidely unadventurous and machined grids to hold everything together. You need to make sure that the stitches all cross each other so that it doesn't fall apart when you wash away the stabiliser.

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I did manage to FME a little flower and could have done a lot more had there been more time but by now I was seriously flagging and had had several battles to get the machine to stitch.
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In case you don't know her, Gina is seated at the sewing machine in the top photo. I've asked Angela to order me one of those storage boxes in the photo, they look ideal for keeping unruly spools of thread in line! Not sure who they are made by?