Free Machining Workshop Results

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It doesn't look a lot but this, along with the first practice piece, is the results of my learning yesterday. As you can see I didn't get the leaves finished, mostly because my machine wasn't happy and I've got a few rogue threads but I was getting there. The little flower and the grid all stayed in one piece once the soluble was rinsed off. You could if you wished paint the leaves before stitching and you could also use a metallic thread which would be lovely.

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Gina showed us another technique using felt and cutout shapes but we didn't have time to try this. The principle is to decide on a strong design, fold over a piece of felt and stitch along the edge of the shapes, remembering to take account of the crossovers. The edge is built up by layering straight stitch and narrow and a wider zigzag so that it looks more like a corded edge. You then cutout the negative areas as you wish, which you can see in the pic below. Once the edge of the trees has been defined the cutout shape is placed on a further piece of felt and the spaces are filled with granite stitch (which you can see in the photo above).

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Below you can see a selection of the work some of the ladies produced. The butterfly was particularly beautiful and the lady had even had time to attach a few beads.

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Gina is a very generous lady, both with her expertise and her willingness to share. She was happy for me to include as much detail of her methods on here as I wish so thank you Gina for an enjoyable day. I am going back in October for another workshop on Free Machine Textures so I must get practising and sort out why my machine kept playing up yesterday. I changed the needle and rethreaded several times and had cleaned the machine so it was maybe one of those things.